Grandma Henke

Sometimes I’m dumb, and sometimes I’m dumber when I pull an all night session of novelling that ends just before the sun peaks over the east mountains.    Today I was dumber.

The inside of my ears sometimes get so infuriatingly itchy that that it is all I can do to keep myself from scratching at them with my fingertips … which only tends to make matters worse.   This morning early they were almost crackling in irritation so I took the advice of my sister, Ann, and put a little bit of Vicks Vapor Rub on the end of a Q-tip and rubbed it around inside the hiding places of my outer ears.    It actually seemed to do the trick but as I dragged my tired body to bed at the crack of dawn, which is my normal routine during the month of November, I slipped and rubbed my tired eyes.  Goodbye all thoughts of sleep once Vicks touches your eyeballs.

That reminded me of a few other difficult lessons with over the counter medical products.    When I was 8 1/2 months pregnant with my second baby I had a low back ache that made it impossible  for me to get comfortable in bed.   My husband, trying to be helpful told me to roll as far onto my stomach as he could and he would rub my back with Witch Hazel..    It seemed a good idea at the time, but proved itself rather quickly to be a real bad decision.   The bottom of a human’s back makes a natural funnel to a tender area of the anatomy; one that isn’t compatible with witch hazel.  It isn’t something that you can quickly wash off either.  It brings tears to my eyes just remembering it!

My brother, Chick, was stuffed up with a sinus cold one time and was rubbing Ben Gay on his chest when he got to thinking that it just might help clear up his sinus’s like Vicks does if you put a little just inside your nose.   He said he got a fair amount on his finger and shoved it up both nostrils quick before he realized what a terrible mistake he’d made.   Ben Gay must have some of the same ingredients as Witch Hazel, with the same effect on soft tissue.    He said he almost drowned trying to flood his nose with cold water.

When we were little and had ear aches, mother would put a little bit of glycerine in our ears and hold it in there with a piece of cotton so the ear wax would soften up and be easy to wash out.    Shortly after we were married I cleaned out one of Lynn’s old bottles of nose drops and filled it full of glycerine to use for my ears.     I forgot to remove the label and my new husband grabbed it one night and dropped several drops of it in each of his nostrils and gave a big sniff.  When it didn’t seem to clear his air passage he tried a second dose not too long after that, and that one didn’t help either.    It wasn’t until he told he had a sickening sweet taste in his mouth that it dawned on me what had happened.

Speaking of cotton in your ears.   My older brother, Bill, thought he was going deaf when he was a teenager.  Finally he’d complained so much about it to mother she took him in to the doctor to have his ears checked.   They found several large pieces of cotton in each of his ears that had probably been there for years.    When the cotton wouldn’t stay in his ears he’d shoved it in farther down so it would … that can have a big effect on your hearing I would imagine.

It doesn’t fall into the medicine category, but my nephew, David, was the first person I knew of who as a child, put a marble in his nose.    It is very difficult to get a marble out of your nose because it is very slick in there and the marble just spins around so you can’t get a hold of it.   In fact, you pretty much have to take the kid to the doctor to have it removed.

My advice … read the labels and follow  the instructions cautiously