It is a standard joke that if I am not well everyone in the world has to know about it. But achieving that can be a bit tricky when it is 4.42 am, you are alone in the guest room to give your spouse a chance at sleeping and in any event have no voice. Unless you have a blog to use as a platform for all your whinges and whines that is. But that's such an easy way....
In I'm Feeling Lucky: Confessions of Employee Number 59 Douglas Edwards writes about his time at Google in the early years. He says that there used to be a screen in reception at the Googleplex which showed a constantly scrolling report of what people were searching for and that he liked to go and watch it now and again. Now, he is no longer at the company, but I like to think that somewhere over in California, some geek now knows from my desperate middle of the night searches that I cannot sleep because I cannot breath and that I need to know why I cannot breathe, whether it matters what colour the substance that is causing me not to breath is, when exactly I can expect to be able to breathe, what I can do to enhance my chances of being able to breath, whether Sudafed Extra or Lemsip has a greater concentration of phenylephrine hydrochloride and whether there is a cheap red A5 Finchley Filofax on sale anywhere. ( Hey, I'm ill, not dead. Some things in life are important. Plus I need a pretty place to write down the answers to my searches).
But seriously, Google ought to get the Nobel Health Prize. ( There is one of those, right? Hang on, let me google that.) Because tucked in its pages, after all the usual stuff involving steam and eucalyptus oils and the stuff like that I have been trying since Thursday) was the advice to lie on your front in your bed with your waist at the end of the bed and hang your top half of your body hanging to the floor. And that was it! Days of pain, stinking like a koala passing wind and feeling like concrete had been poured down my nostrils. Gone. I can breath. And as a happy by product I can tell you that if you are not to slide off the nice matress protector and smack your aching bonce on the floor, you get a good abdominal toning exercise too.
I notice Google has a new privacy policy. Do I care if they store enough information linked to my IPP address to be able to tell the FBI that I have a nocturnal interest in neti pots? Nope. I just told the world all of my own volition that I was making out like a bat in the middle of the night. I don't care.
I CAN BREATHE!!!!!
