A Meme!

I'm just sitting here waiting for Keith Olberman to come on so I can make myself more crazy over the election, so I thought I'd distract me by doing this meme that Mary just posted. And even though I don't have a terrible cold like she does -- feel better soon! -- I thought I'd keep it in the same vein, so here goes:

Here are the official rules:
1. Link to your tagger and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blog.
4. Let them know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

So, Seven Sick Facts About Me

1. I was born during a January blizzard, and my mother caught a cold in the labor room, so I had some horrible illness when I was two weeks old. The doctor didn't give it a name, but it was probably bronchitis. He told my father that he was going to give me a massive dose of penicillin, which would probably cure me, but if was allergic to penicillin, I would most likely die, and there was no way to test me at that point. You know how it turned out.

2. The general practitioner whose office was on the ground floor of our apartment building in the Bronx -- Dr. Levine -- had served with my father during the war in Europe, where my father, who outranked him, commandeered his jeep because he needed it to scout out some area they were moving into. The doctor hated my father after that and wouldn't talk to him for the rest of the war, but saved my life eight years later anyway.

3. When I was a kid, I was always kind of sniffling hard and swallowing, and when I was in my twenties, I heard about something called "post-nasal drip" and it freaked me out because I had really thought that everybody did that, had that sense I had of something running down the back of the throat. I was astonished to learn that this was not a universal human phenomenon, since I had never lived a day without it.

4. I never had real allergies -- other than the drip -- until about a year after we moved into this house, so that was about 22 years ago. I didn't have them as a kid, I just had colds all the time. Hmm.

5. I don't remember ever having an ear infection as a kid, or sinus problems.

6. My father had some odd notion, at least as I recall, that nose drops were supposed to go down your throat. Or maybe I just remember them going down my throat after he put them in my nose. All I really remember is that if they wanted to give me nose drops, it took both of them to catch me and hold me down, and they were always administered by Jack.

7. When we had colds, Shirl would set up a humidifier in our room -- the vaporizer, she called it -- that made horrible noise all night, and had a big green glass tank with a little cup on top to hold the Vicks. We were strictly warned not to get out of bed because if we did, we would trip over the cord and bring scalding water down on ourselves and have to go to the hospital and be treated for burns. I was also a bed wetter, and now you know why.

Okay, Keith time. (Oh, if you want to do the meme, consider yourself tagged. It's not necessarily a sick meme, I was just inspired.)


WATCHING FAMILY GUY :: ENTRY #1885
READING: Don't Know Much About History by Kenneth C. Davis