Maniac Monday

Hello My Dear Friends,

I'd like to start todays post with a thought that means a little something to me.

"When I die, I'd like to go peacefully in my sleep like Grandpa; Not kicking and screaming like the passengers in his car."

by Jack Handey

As you read the above quote correlate that with my below post.

Monday morning started like any other day for me. I perform the following steps like clockwork:

1. Hit "snooze" on the alarm multiple times before getting out of bed.
2. Shower.
3. Dress.
4. Greet Ruth in the kitchen.
5. Take my glucosamine pills ( 3 horse pills) one at a time with water.
6. Say family prayer
7. Kiss Ruth
8. Go to Work.

This Monday was slightly different however. I had been working an outage on the phone from the minute I woke up and instead of taking my glucosamine pills one at a time I took them all at once. These particular glucosamine pills are huge horse-pill type gel-caps (see exhibit A). They are black and sticky. The thought occurred to me that I shouldn't take them all at once but I did anyway.

Exhibit A

Halfway to work I could feel that that the pills had become lodged way down deep in my esophagus (see exhibit B). This was painful so I took a hard swig of my bottled water.

Exhibit B

(Side Note: Have you ever taken a drink so fast that it was very painful in your esophagus? The kind of pain that makes you shut one eye and grimace in pain? Well me too!)

Just as I took the hard swig of water I experienced the hard pain in the esophagus (as previously explained) and THAT pain on top of the pain that I was already feeling from the horse pills sent a distress signal to my brain that said: PREPARE FOR SHUTDOWN!!

Now I'm driving 55 miles an hour when it occurred to me that I was about to feint! Not Cool! Through blurred vision I can vaguely make out a place to safely pull the car off of the road.

Then the bizarre happened:

I woke up.

Waking up from the most peaceful sleep I've ever had I wondered why cars were driving directly at me. Peering through squinted sleepy eyes I racked it up to a crazy dream. I shut my eyes again, "Ahhhh back to sleep," man was I comfy!!

Then this little voice says, "This isn't a dream!!"

I open my eyes a little wider this time and discover that I am in my car (what a strange place to sleep) and I am in the wrong lane of traffic, stopped and cars are headed toward me. I look in my rear-view mirror and I can see cars approaching from behind me. Quickly, I drive across the road and into a nearby turnoff. I put the car in "park" and began unraveling in my mind what had just happened to me.

I had forgotten everything and my first thought was that I had fallen asleep at the wheel. Then slowly I remembered that the last thing I was thinking while driving was that I was going to feint! Oh my goodness the realization of what had happened hit me like a ton of bricks.

I just feinted while driving my company car!!

More than that, I had feinted while driving 55 miles an hour and stopped precisely in the opposite lane with out injuring myself or anyone else! I marveled that I had been so protected! Just then my phone rang again and I found myself back working on the outage that I had been working on before.

I put the car in drive and made my way to work....slowly.

I alerted my manager of the event that I had just been through. He was quite concerned. Of course major companies don't like it when you pass out while operating one of their company cars so I was escorted to the emergency room at the local hospital.

Everything ended happily. The ER (while they didn't believe me at first, they were sure I had a seizure or heart attack or something) cleared me and bestowed paperwork on me that indicated that I was in perfect health (well...minus being overweight). I had to visit my personal doctor the next day to get my driving privileges restored, which they were. My personal doctor wants my esophagus looked at by a specialist. I agreed.

In retrospect I can see that I shouldn't have tried to eat all those horse-pills at once.

That will be my message of wisdom to you.