Snack attack

I love these things. If our building were on fire, and we had any one hand (which we usually don't as they are had to find in Australia), this might be one of the top three items I would consider rescuing:

The dimensions of the chocolate sidewalls are simply above reproach. And the consistency is of the peanut butter filling, divine.

So when Tom brought home a modest cache of them from his business trip last week, of course I was thrilled beyond measure.

Now, as a kid, my parents didn't have a lot of random rules. They were less concerned about hair color experiments or dabbling in oh-so-cool teenage cigarette smoking...basically it boiled down to "not doing things that could permanently mess up your life".

As I recall, the biggies were: "No motorcycles, no trampolines, no skateboards and no eating peanut butter directly from the jar". That seems reasonable, right? The last one was mostly advocated by my dad, who, as a physician, knows a lot about asphyxiation. If you accidentally get peanut butter down your windpipe instead of your esophagus, there is no way to dissolve it and your lungs can stop working quite quickly.

I think we can all see where this is going.

Fortunately, it wasn't a lack of oxygen to my brain that did me in the other night, when I raided the Reece's stash just before bed. When I woke up choking, I think I was able to draw from all those years of anti-peanut butter sentiment and my body kicked into adrenaline overdrive. It knew to do whatever was necessary to cough it up. After a good half hour of retching, I lay there gurgling and lightly coughing to myself for the rest of the night while poor Tom excused himself to the couch.

My doctor says I either pulled a muscle in my chest or cracked a rib. The treatment is the same for both: essentially that's "buck up and live with the pain for between 6 weeks to 6 months".

It hurts the worst when I sneeze - that almost made me black out. That, followed by laughing, coughing and, of course, breathing. I try to take shallow little innocuous breaths, but she said that can lead to a lung infection, so I need to stay on enough pain medication to try and take deep breaths and use my full lung capacity. Let's just hope this is all sorted out by our Christmas scuba trip next month.

Tom got debriefed on the whole situation last night. You know him, he's seldom prone to hyperbole and, anymore, the odd happenings of being married to me don't tend to render him as incredulous as one might imagine. It was pretty cute though....

"So, let's just sum this up here; you cracked a rib, snacking?"

I did.