Pickles & Dimes

Jason had the hiccups for nearly 55 hours straight.

55 HOURS.

It was seriously awful. These weren’t the cute, quiet kind of hiccups. They were the loud ones you knew hurt.

He got them at 10 a.m. on Monday. When I called him that afternoon at 1 p.m., he was crestfallen. “I can’t get rid of these things,” he said, sadly.

That evening after dinner, the hiccups went away. We rejoiced, but not even 30 minutes later, they were back. Jason hiccuped loudly and looked over at me in a panic, his shoulders jerking. I went online to look up cures. He had already tried a spoonful of sugar, a spoonful of peanut butter, various breath-holding techniques, drinking from the wrong side of a glass of water, etc., etc. We tried a few more breathing exercises. I tried scaring him. Nothing worked.

He got ready for bed extra early, not feeling like doing much of anything. The bed shook with every hiccup. We worried. At 10:40, after more than an hour and a half of hiccuping painfully in bed, Jason finally fell asleep and the hiccups stopped.

At 5:25 a.m. Tuesday, a few minutes after he got up for work, they came back.

I called him throughout the day, hoping he’d be fine, but each time, he sounded more and more tormented. Conversations were hard because his hiccups were worsening in the form of multiples: rapid-fire hic-hic-hic-hic-hic-hics that topped out once at eight hiccups in a row (I found myself silently counting them). It was hard for Jason to catch his breath, and his chest and diaphragm ached. I told him to call the clinic. At this point, he had had the hiccups for 24 hours (not counting the time they disappeared when he was asleep).

He went to the doctor, who gave him a prescription for Chlorpromazine, a strong anti-pyschotic drug used to treat schizophrenia and people with violent hallunications. The doctor called the prescription into our pharmacy, which was closing shortly, but when I met Jason there, they didn’t have it and told Jason he couldn’t get it until the next day, which was obviously NOT AN OPTION. The pharmacy finally agreed to transfer it to another pharmacy that was open later, which meant we had 40 minutes to drive against traffic during rush hour to pick it up. On the way there, I called ahead to make sure they had it and I could barely hear the pharmacist over Jason’s hiccups.

After making it with plenty of time to spare, we held hands tightly as we walked into the pharmacy. The pharmacist asked if Jason had ever taken the medication before and when he said no, she motioned us over to the “privacy booth” where, in an excessively loud but calm voice said, “OK, so this medication will help even out your moods,” putting emphasis on the last few words, whereupon Jason quickly interrupted to say, “Yeah, I’m just taking it for hiccups.” “Oh!” she exclaimed, briskly. “Well, this will help with that, too!”

Before we even left the building, Jason took a pill. That night, while making dinner (and after I had read off the medication’s seemingly unending list of frightening side effects), he said he wished we had some 7-Up or Sierra Mist at home because he felt that would calm his stomach. I raced to a nearby gas station in my pajama pants and bought two bottles of Sprite and a can of 7-Up. “Um, this is an…odd purchase,” the guy behind the counter said. I told him about Jason’s hiccups.

After dinner, the hiccups went away again…for about 20 minutes. The rest of the night Jason was too tired/miserable to want to try any other techniques, and I prayed the prescription would be fast-acting. We again went to bed early, Jason still hiccuping madly and my stomach in knots trying to figure out what could be causing it. I needed something to fix.

At 10:04 p.m., Jason fell into a light sleep. The hiccups stopped. At 12:55 a.m., they started up again. His face was a mask of anguish. He got up and went into the spare bedroom to try to sleep and spare me from the noise. (I could still hear him.) He got maybe three hours of sleep.

In the morning, he was a wreck. “What if I have these forever?” he asked, while I tried to tell him he wouldn’t. “You don’t know that,” he said, hunched over sadly. Thinking maybe it was related to acid reflux, I offered Jason an array of things from our medicine cabinet: Rolaids, Maalox, Tums. Turns out every single thing was expired. The newest one expired in 2008. So much for that.

Around lunchtime, I called him and his boss answered the phone. When I asked if Jason was around, he said, “You mean Hic-hic-hicuppy?” I was pissed. This was well beyond being funny.

At 4:45 p.m., Jason called. “I can’t breathe very well,” he informed me, as my own heart stopped. “Whenever I hiccup multiple times, my lungs freeze up.” I told him he needed to call the doctor if the hiccups weren’t gone by morning. He agreed.

I drove home, stopping by the same gas station to pick up some Rolaids. “Hey, homeslice!” the guy behind the counter greeted me, as if we were reenacting the first scene in Juno. “How’s your hubby’s hiccups?”

“He still has them.”

“No shit?!?” he exclaimed, as a customer with a little girl said, “Hey – language!”

“Sorry,” the guy apologized, then turned to a coworker lugging around a case of two-liter bottles. “This girl’s husband has had the hiccups for like, 90 hours.”

It was more like 60, but I didn’t bother to correct him.

I bought the largest tub of Tums they had, some Maalox, and a couple rolls of Rolaids. As I was leaving the counter guy joked, “If this doesn’t help, I hear a baseball bat to the face will do it.”

When I got home, Jason and I started talking. After a few seconds, I realized, and quietly asked him, “Are they…?”

He said, just as quietly, “Yes. As of 5:00.”

We carefully ate dinner, carefully played cribbage, and Jason carefully ate a few Tums. No hiccups. At 8:20, he said, “I’m exhausted,” and went to bed, Shorty snuggled up next to him. For once, Sunny didn’t act like a dipshit and start meowing her head off for food at 8:30. I sat quietly on the couch, reading a book about survival in desperate situations and eyeballing the clock while listening for the telltale sound of hiccups. At 9:30, I quietly fed the cats, took Shorty outside and shut off the lights before climbing quietly into bed next to a cautiously hopeful (and hiccup-free) Jason.

At 5:25 this morning, Jason’s alarm went off. Still no hiccups. We avoided talking directly about it – just like a no-hitter, unusually good traffic, Voldemort and Fight Club – and used pointed glances and meaningful head tilts to ask and answer the question: Are they still gone?

Yes.

Finally.

For good, we hope.

I know some people hate it when others complain about the weather, but I really think you need to have experienced this year’s winter firsthand to understand the full range of despair and rage emanating from the state of Minnesota. Winter is just toying with us here. Fifty-degree weather followed by a week of below-freezing temps. Trying to fight rising floodwaters with frozen sandbags. I mean, 99.5% of us now watch the news just so we can telepathically swear at the meterologist. Even hardcore snowmobilers are done with winter, OK? That’s how exhausting and drawn-out this one has been.

This is the view of our front yard. On the left is how it looked on Tuesday after a week of nearly 50-degree temperatures. Is that green grass? Why yes, yes it is! The likes of which we haven’t seen since November. Of 2005, it feels like.

But wait! Not even 24 hours later, it looked like this. That’s about five inches of “annoyance snow,” the cutesy term the weathermen use when it snows just enough to mess with the commute (yesterday’s drive took me two hours and ten minutes) and force you to shovel. This “snow” was especially “annoying” because it had rained first, then turned to sleet, and then added another 3-4 inches of heavy snow. Whereas shoveling a normal, light snowfall feels like the equivalent of shoveling up 50 dry, fluffy towels, this snowfall felt more like shoveling up 50 sopping-wet towels. That had been encased in cement. And chained to the ground.

Here’s our backyard before the snow and after the shoveling. That snowpile behind the deck was once taller than my head. Please disregard our peeling deck. Before we could paint it, we had to replace our leaky gutters, which we did last summer. But now I’m wondering if we bother to repaint the deck at all since we’ll never see it again and have to shovel it EVERY FIVE MINUTES ANYWAY.

I think the thing that bothers me the most is that there was so much green grass, and now: Not So Much. It’s like we were SO CLOSE. Argh.

Forget that whole “March comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb” nonsense.

We can see green grass in our yard (it is supposed to snow 2-3 inches tomorrow, but that is for Future Shauna to weep over)

There is a pot-bellied robin singing in our tree. His song is titled: “Holy crap, I thought it would be warmer by now – this explains why I am the only bird in the area”

Jason & I discovered the musical greatness of the Avett Brothers. And then we went to read up on them on Wikipedia, exclaiming that we’d never even heard of these guys and whoops! They’ve been around for more than 10 years and have a boatload of albums.

I self-diagnosed our non-working furnace issue via the Internet and then had the satisfaction of hearing the repair guy confirm that we had a dirty flame sensor. Heh heh. Dirty flame sensor.

In direct correlation, the uglier my dog-bit finger looks as it heals, the more I can bend it.

Jason brought home Buffalo Wild Wings for my birthday dinner. Not only that, but our regular BWW had unexpectedly closed, so he drove 20 miles out of his way to make sure I had spicy garlic wings on St. Patty’s Day.

Only three more days until I can indulge in some Cadbury Eggs (via a self-imposed “One Month Before Easter” rule)

I moved to a new desk at work. The interruption level is down 937%.

I did a lot of organizing over the past week. On one hand, I may be perceived as a nerd for admitting that I enjoy the act of organizing, but on the other hand, I don’t care what anyone thinks because my linen closet is spotless.

If Shorty sees us playing cribbage, he retires to our bed, knowing it’s going to be awhile before he’s allowed up on the couch. When we go upstairs to find him, his tail thumps so wildly with excitement at our presence that he sometimes turns around in confusion to see what’s making all the racket.

On Friday, I left work and prepared to merge into traffic at a busy intersection notorious for being blockaded by giant snow piles that impede your line of sight. I crept forward as far as I dared and saw that there was a gap in the line of oncoming cars. I seized my opportunity and accelerated into traffic when-

BAM!

My neck snapped forward and my brain thought, “What the HELL?!?”

My first thought was that I had accidentally cut someone off, but after looking into my rearview mirror, I saw the vehicle that had been behind me waiting to merge. Apparently, the guy decided that two cars could fit into a gap made for one, and while I was merging at a normal rate of speed, he must’ve floored it to hit me so hard.

I pulled over as best I could on the busy road (the freeze-thaw cycles around here mean giant puddles of water on warm days, and crusty, icy floes on cold ones) and turned on my hazard lights. Then I got out of my car, my head swirling with thoughts of insurance deductibles and car repairs.

The guy came rushing up to me, put his arm on my shoulder and said, “I’m so sorry. SO SORRY. Are you OK?”

After assuring him I felt fine, he starting blabbering about the time he got hit by a drunk driver, and then attempted to explain the accident by saying he was watching oncoming traffic instead of me, which made absolutely no sense because I didn’t hesitate, or stop, or anything. I merged into traffic like a normal person. And he positively rammed into me.

While the guy kept asking if I was OK, I squatted down to examine my bumper. What looked like a scratch turned out to be dust. What ended up being two teeny spots of paint transfer didn’t match (they were blue while his vehicle was gold). After a few more moments of looking everything over, I begrudgingly told him everything was fine and got back into my car. Then, because I’m a paranoid person, I took down his license and jotted down a quick description of him on my check register, just in case.

I drove home slowly and cautiously and got Shorty harnessed for his walk. Meeting us at the end of the driveway, Jason pulled in. I briefly told him about my accident and continued on my walk with Shorty as he drove into the garage. Halfway down the block, Shorty picked up something that resembled a chunk of cauliflower and started eating it.

“Oh, dammit!” I said, mentally kicking myself for not throwing that piece of whatever it was away the other four times he tried to eat it.

And then, like I’ve done countless other times (I swear, our neighborhood could be renamed “Chicken Bone Avenue,”) I put my winter-gloved hand into Shorty’s mouth to retrieve whatever he was chewing on.

He was chewing furiously, attempting to finish it quickly before I could take it from him, and after a few moments, I could tell he wasn’t going to give it up, so I started to withdraw my hand.

And that’s when he bit me. (Not on purpose.)

I knew instantly that he had broken the skin because I actually felt it puncture. The sensation was like a fork piercing a hot dog.

And the pain was immediate.

I yelped in pain and kept walking. After about 10 seconds I turned back. My glove felt wet and I was starting to feel fuzzy. With my luck, I’d pass out eight blocks away. Jason saw us coming back and waved happily.

Near tears and slightly hyperventilating, I said, “Shorty bit me and it hurts so bad!”

Jason paused, confused, his face still wearing a welcoming smile. “What?”

My breathing even more ragged, I said louder, “Shorty bit me (I probably sounded exactly like the kid from the ‘Charlie Bit Me’ video) and it hurts SO BAD!!!”

At that point, I was doing that odd thing where you limp even though your legs are perfectly fine. Logically, I knew that the pain was in my left middle finger, and in that finger only, but it had surrounded my body with a bubble of agony so intense I could feel everything. Every molecule of cold air, every current of wind. It was raw and throbbing and pulsating and drumming and it kept crescendoing without any prospect of ebbing.

Jason (who handled this whole drama with a cool, calm demeanor I love him even more for) grabbed Shorty and made me sit on the front steps. “I don’t want to look at it!” I said, hiding my face in my good hand.

He slowly pulled off the glove and then said those words you always want to hear: “Oh my god.”

“Do I need stitches???” I jabbered, imagining flaps of skin and visible bone and severed tendons. I flexed my finger experimentally and realized that 1) I could move it and 2) by doing so, I could increase the amount of pain despite my belief that it had maxed itself out.

“OK,” said Jason, putting my glove back on. “I’m going to put Shorty away and then I’ll come help you. Are you OK out here?”

“Yes,” I sniffled, although as soon as he left I felt hot tears soaking through my glove, which got me thinking about the warm blood soaking the other glove, and then any pretense at calmness totally disappeared and I started sobbing, my face still hidden behind my good hand because I did not want to look at my injury, which in my mind now resembled E.T.’s giant pulsating red finger.

Miserably picturing my start to the weekend being spent sitting for hours in an Urgent Care I realized that in the past hour, I had gotten into a car accident and got bitten by a dog. What luck! I should buy a lottery ticket once this straitjacket of nausea releases its hold on me!

Jason came back out and said, “OK. Let’s look at it again.” He gently pulled off the glove and examined my finger. “There’s a lot of blood, but I don’t think you’ll need stitches.”

“I won’t?”

“No; I don’t think you will.”

I took my first full breath and wiped my eyes. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, pretty sure,” he answered as he turned my finger over. “Oh, I didn’t see this,” he said, “this” being the puncture wound on the bottom of my finger. “Yikes.”

With my one-track mind I echoed, “Will I need stitches???”

“No,” he said, “But we need to get you cleaned up.”

Once inside, I made a beeline for the bathroom to rest my chin on the toilet and examine the level of dustballs behind the tank. “Give me a few minutes,” I gasped, as Jason calmly told me to take my time, but that he wanted to clean it out as soon as possible.

I childishly thought: No way.

Jason quickly fed the cats, who were rudely oblivious to my plight and probably would’ve dined on my finger if the opportunity presented itself (Sunny, anyway) and asked if I was still OK.

“Yep!” I chirped cheerily from my slumped position on the bathroom rug. Never better!

I finally summoned up my courage and looked at my finger. Truthfully, it was disappointing. It didn’t look at all like I imagined when aligned with the corresponding pain. There was a small circular puncture on the bottom of my finger, with a matching puncture wound on the top, right below the cuticle. A chunk of skin was peeled off and pushed up toward the cuticle and half my nail was dark purple. (“You might lose your nail,” Jason had warned me, which was A-OK with me as long as stitches were not involved.) Blood had pooled internally on the bottom of my finger, making it look purple and bruised as well. I briefly wondered what would have happened if my nail hadn’t been in the way.

I finally got up from the floor and made my way into the bedroom to lie down. It was so hot – why was it so hot? I peeled off my socks. HOT.

Jason called to me again: “I really want to clean that off.” Damn, I was hoping he had forgotten all about that. God, it’s like the guy didn’t want me to get an infection or something.

“OK,” I mumbled. “But I’m going to sit down for it, OK?”

“Um…sure,” he said, grabbing a chair and positioning it at the kitchen sink, next to some paper towels and ibuprofen and bandages. He was prepared.

“Let’s get your ring off first,” he said, struggling to remove it while I stifled a scream, because while my ring was on my ring finger (obviously) and not on my injured finger, the pain had managed to affect my entire hand.

“Wow, um, you’re really clammy,” he said, feeling my back. “REALLY clammy.”

“Yep, clammy,” I agreed, weakly.

He carefully rinsed my finger off and bandaged me up while I hung my head into the sink just in case, and man, I was so thankful he had been home when it happened because otherwise I’m almost certain I would’ve passed out somewhere in the middle of our driveway.

Ten minutes later we were making dinner together and 30 minutes later, we were snuggling with a contrite Shorty, whose first act after being let out of his kennel was to sheepishly sniff my finger.

The rest of the weekend passed without incident. Unless you count me trying to make coffee for Jason and accidentally dumping some grounds into the pot.

Today, my finger is still really stiff and won’t bend 100% like it used to, but it looks pretty good. The bruising is less visible and typing is difficult, but there doesn’t seem to be any permanent damage.

And this morning Shorty got to enjoy eating something he found on the street without interruption.