Why We Look after Blowing Our Nose

I am almost over a wicked cold that I picked up from one or both of my kids. Symptoms included: body-ache, sore throat, headache, cough, and a furious runny nose. This last one is particularly bad. I went through at least a box and a half of Kleenex. I'm beginning to feel well enough to resume normal activities like blog entries, speaking in a normal octave, and shaking my fist at the falling snow that has no right to invade the skies in the middle of April. I also have the energy to reflect on an aspect of being sick that I had not ever put much thought into: the admittedly gross practice of looking into a tissue after I had blown my nose.

Maybe it was because my nose was producing amazingly amounts of mucus, but I kept examining the tissues I used. I marvelled when I needed to use three of four tissues to clear my sinuses. I never called Caryn over to look, but I did have a moment of self-awareness when I thought to myself, "What am I doing? This is really gross. What am I hoping to see?" For several minutes I could not come up with an answer other than that I am disgusting. But I cannot be alone in this curiosity. There must be other people who examine their used tissues, or who stare into the toilet, or obsess over their fingernails, or whatever other socially unacceptable self-examination that interests them.

Maybe this impulse is why people go into medicine. I am normally repulsed by the interior of bodies: valves, arteries, membranes, bile, hemorrhage, just a few of the words that can send me to the ground with my head between my knees. It's possible that, despite my aversion, I'm still interested in what makes me a flesh-and-blood human being. It's just that my comfort level end with used Kleenex. I mean, that yellow-ish flem, that was...is...was....me! Or a part of me at very least.

People are not as physically defined as we sometimes think. Food moves in and out of us, as does air and water. Sounds too, enter our ears and leave our mouths (and other parts). Blood can even be moved one person to another, body parts too. Skin cells shed and are replaced by other. Environmental toxins enter us and can accumulate in dangerous and deadly ways. It is not so much that we are independent animals operating in our world around us, rather we are woven into the fabric of the earth, or maybe the earth (and water, air, bacteria, dust, etc.) and woven into us into mystical quilt of human life.

And that  was only one though that came to me as I looked into that used tissue.