Oh,
the joy of hiccoughs/hiccups
by
Robert LaFrance
Hiccoughing is bad enough without
this unending debate about how the word is spelled. Most people get hiccoughs
at one time or another in their careers, but it’s surprising how many people
also suffer from bouts of hiccups. Often it’s the same people. For clarity I
shall use both spellings in random order.
I was talking to Flug the other day
and, as an experiment, I asked him what he knew about rocket science. “Well,
nothing, not a blamed thing,” he said.
“What do you know about how an iPad works?” I
continued, and again not a blamed thing, he had to admit. “How about fixing
chainsaws?” I persisted. “Or the right grub to feed a canary? How to find your
way around Montreal? What makes a baseball curve? How do you make a profit on
the stock market?” He didn’t know any of that stuff; but wait: what about this
question: “How do you cure hiccoughs?”
“Of course I know how to cure them,”
he said. EVERYBODY knows how to cure hiccups. “You just have someone sneak up
behind you and set off a firecracker, or you lean over and drink from a water
glass while it’s tilting over. Or take a big drink of warm ginger ale and hold
your breath for fifteen seconds. Never fails.”
“Flug, you are exceptionally full of
male cow manure. You know very well there’s no cure for hiccoughs – or hiccups
if you prefer – but you, like everybody else, swear you know a foolproof
method.”
It’s true. My Uncle Ernie would
swear on three bibles and a Popular Mechanics book that all you have to do is
hold your breath for a minute and when you regained consciousness your hiccups
etc. would be gone. A man in Saskatoon said the cure was to put your head
underwater and breathe deeply. Have friends nearby.
It’s like the common cold. Ever met
anyone who didn’t have a sure-fire method of beating it? Few profess to be able
to PREVENT the common cold, but some people will swear that once you get it,
zinc lozenges dissolved in battery acid and Gillett’s Lye will take away the
symptoms. I hasten to add, this is not for drinking but for rubbing on the feet
once it stops fizzing. If your feet fizz later, you’re on your own.
People rub camomile lotion on their
throats, drink 28 glasses of water in an hour, sniff camphor, put mustard
plasters on their chests, and pray to Zeus while eating horseradish, but
they’re only kidding themselves. I happen to know that drinking large amounts
of lemonade over a period of a week usually cures the common cold, but then I
always get hiccoughs afterward.
Sort of on the same subject, I
should go up a few paragraphs and refer to the phrase ‘rocket science’. I have
used it before, and one week that I did have it in my column, My Aunt
Rutherford (Ruth for short although she’s 6’2”) phoned to say that her daughter
who owned a textile factory near Dollard Des Ormeaux, PQ, had invented a new
way to stitch triangles of cloth onto men’s pants, or trousers if you wish.
What did this have to do with my column, you wonder?
“I guess you could call her a pocket
scientist,” said Aunt Ruth. You can see where I get it.
Getting quickly back to hiccups, the reason I
brought up (no pun intended) the subject was that I was recently reading about
a guy from Iowa who had hiccoughed for 68 years. How could one go through 430
million hiccoughs – that’s what the encyclopedia says – and not have it damage
some of life’s experiences? I know what you’re thinking about, but my mind was
considering the acts of threading a needle, putting one of those little pins in
a watch bracelet, or brain surgery. “There, got the medulla almost in place
behind the earlobe, and – HIC! Ooops. Don’t step in that, nurse Smith.”
The next time you hear someone say he or she knows a
sure-fire cure for hiccups, call for the paddy wagon and send that person away,
because there ain’t no cure short of a bullet between the eyes. By the way, as
if ‘hiccough’ and ‘hiccup’ are not enough, the medical name for hiccups is ‘synchronous diaphragmatic flutter (SDF)’, or ‘singultus’.
As I was reading all
about the subject, I noticed that there was another phrase that seemed to fit
those who swore up, down, and crosswise that they knew a cure for hiccups. It’s
‘myoclonic jerk’, which turns out to be hiccoughs, or, as they say in the
explanation, ‘an involuntary contraction of the diaphram’.
So there you have it,
there ain’t no cure for hiccups and certainly not for hiccoughs, but it helps
to stay away from myoclonic jerks.
-end-
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