TMI Alert

Yes, pay heed - I'm deploying the Too Much Information Alert! This post will be of a personal nature, inwhich bodily functions may be described. If you do not wish to be advised of said functions, please tune now to Metronome while I discuss.

ok - now that the kids have left the room, I'm just getting over another cold sponsored by my mother-in-law's nursing home. That place is a bioweapons development lab. All these old people sit in there together, 24/7, hawking up loogies and spitting on each other, breathing each other's vapors, and incubating germs that haven't seen light since WWII. I don't even want to think about the amount of feces undoubtably smeared around. (I'm not exaggerating - it is an advanced Alzheimer's ward.) I'm convinced the old men are full of exquisite viruses from the far reaches of Iwo Jima, Bataan, Corregidor and Guadalcanal. Put them together with the radioactive old women who worked in radium clock factories, who built x-ray displays for shoe shops and who soaked up fallout from early H-bomb tests, and you've got a powerful, effortless setting for the birth of new viruses that could put Sars Bird Ebola to shame.

So Pep and I are their guinea pigs, and I just got over another prototye. It was a sinus bomb with a 14 kiloton detonation of mucous, phlegm, and snot. Hideous thing. And the way to fight back is the "sinus lavage."

According to NPR, a clinical study recently confirmed the benefit of pouring salt water through your nose. Saline stimulates the cilia to beat faster, thus propelling "matter" from nasal passages. It also discourages the growth of bacteria and washes out viral bodies. The study showed that people who rinse their sinuses daily get a lot fewer colds than people who don't lavage.

So I've been using my Neti pot a lot in the past week. The Neti makes it easy to pour salt water in one nostril and out the other. It looks like this:

There are plenty of online instructions for use, so I won't take the time to explain it. I'll just say, the process feels odd at first, but it quickly begins to feel good. I'm sure a lot of readers have comparable experiences to draw from. And no, I don't mean enema! Or, for some of you, maybe I do.

Anyway, just one word of warning. You MUST use Kosher salt in the Neti. Kosher doesn't have any iodine in it. Iodine will burn the living crap out of you - so DO NOT use table salt or sea salt! Lots of online sources say, "hey, table salt will work fine!" Well, yeah. It'll work. And you'll feel a Molotov cocktail explode inside your head. So use Kosher salt!

Now you know one of my secret vices - sinus lavage. Have to say, after the Nursing Home Prototype Virus, it did a great job of cleaning house. Do the douche!