The potpourri that is life
Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 5:35PM Last wednesday saw a turning point in Daddy's life. He had written posts the previous weekend on how he was determined to change his lifestyle and life, take better care of himself, blah, blah, blah, blah, and more blah.
San even took a secret photo of him meditating in the backyard(which he found out much later while downloading all photos from the camera).
If this trend continues, people will start to think twice before they come visit us. Looks like everyone in the house has started taking secret pictures!
Just when things were going great, the little one came back with a small but stern cough. As is customary in this house, when kids are sick, they sleep on daddy's side with his left hand for a pillow and when they are in extreme distress they call out "Daddy!!!!", preferably after 3:00AM but precisely before 4:00AM and just as he looks at them and says "Ennada kuttyma?" let out a bellowing cough and directly trasfer spittle into his open mouth!
Daddy, who has somehow managed to get a Ph.D., is an evolutional retard. After going through this repeatedly with two kids over five years, he still has not figured out that, this whole sleeping with the sick kid is a bad idea. He just does not learn!
That fateful cough, coincided with Saturn moving to the ninth place in daddy's horoscope and at precisely 3:58AM the flag of the invaders was planted on Summit Daddy and when the sun rose the next morning, it was fluttering for all the world to see. The next few days were a blur. Daddy had been taken siege.
Did I mention the Saturn moving around to wrong places on the planetary belt, as predicted by famous astrologers? Apparently, Mr. Saturn can do a lot of bad things according to Hindu astrology, and as predicted, daddy's future took another nosedive. Almost ten years after marriage, he decided to have an affair!
Yes. We all know San is a stunner and daddy loves her very much. But as fate would have it, he was physically weak and mentally drained and in a moment of total weakness he succumbed to someone he met at the doctors office.
Her name was Codeine Robitussen and she was one sleeping beauty! She took him places he had never been to before and even locations which daddy had seen only with his dear wife appeared in a new light. Dad thought he had found the elixir of life!
The good news was that the affair ended three days later when the mother in law returned from India. She took one look at daddy at the airport, saw his clothes and said "You are a bloodly rag! and I am going to fix this for good." It was just daddy and the MIL driving back from the airport for almost an hour, with the MIL lecturing a quiet daddy on his habits and how her poor daughter deserved better. The MIL, had "Had enough!".
They came back from the airport, MIL's bags were unpacked, and they had enough material to open a small south Indian provision/sweets/savories store in Cupertino. Daddy had already broken up with the exotic Codeine and to celebrate, the MIL offered him and San sweets and savories. Daddy, tried small samples of every little item, only to find that they all tasted like "arisi maavu" aka "rice flour"! Had he been a carnivore he probably would have declared that they all tasted like "chicken"! This was a disaster. Dad had lost his sense of smell, sound, taste, needed windshield wipers for his watering eyes and was pretty much in suspended animation.
Then a miracle happened. He met the right doctor who gave him the right medicine. In the great country of United States, the probability of finding the right doctor is 1 in 10 and the probability of that doctor giving the right medicine is 1 in 10. The nine out of ten times you get that kid out of college looking up your nose and patting down your throat, you can bet your copay that you are going to walk home with stuff that will make you regret the attempt to seek medical help. That said, the chances of getting a screwed up prescription is very high and the calculation of that conditional probability will be left as a homework exercise for the reader.
Sorry, I forgot, this blog is not a math textbook! Let's get back to Daddy and his miracle. The last twenty four hours have seen daddy get back his sight, speech, smell and most importantly his sense of taste! Based on his recent self tests he concludes that :
Seedai tastes like seedai,
Murukku tastes like Murukku,
Karasevai tastes like karasevai, just as he expected!
Mixture tastes like Mixture,
Varuval tastes like varuval and surprisingly,
Sohan papdi tastes like Heaven!
Now that daddy successfully made it to work today, can talk again albeit with a slight cough and a raspy voice, even play with the kids and more importantly devour Sohan papdi like nobody's business...
We are one happy family again!
ps. This has definitly been daddys worse sickness in ten years and he has a newfound appreciation for family, life, love and all that he should appreciate more. He seriously believes he saw Yama driving a Sohan Papdi vandi with the big glass jar all empty, trying to aim his lasso to grab daddy into an empty tasteless world.
pps. We are not talking the Sohan burfis here. We are talking fresh off the bell jar, mouth watering, raw cotton!
pps. He also thinks Codeine Robitussen was one bad @$$ girl and he is better off without her bad influence!
.
all part of life, doctor, sick, taste, the same medicine
Reader Comments (9)
ehhehee this was so funny - hope you're well recovered
sundar:
aah! now your previous post on "feel"ings make sense, as also the comment you left...
v.b. was wanting me to respond to further clarify (my kiteflying kaiku). maybe a re-read will do the job, but i will heed v.b.'s suggestion just as well.
"let out a bellowing cough and directly trasfer spittle into his open mouth!"
looks like this method of transmission is more successful than the inter-nasal mode. trust the kids to figure that out!!
"As is customary in this house, when kids are sick, they sleep on daddy's side with his left hand for a pillow "
actually, that custom prevails in this household too. not only that, it happens when kids are well too!
"He just does not learn!"
my two data points - with respect to this behaviour - lead me to conclude that the problem with phds is that they just do not learn!!
"We are talking fresh off the bell jar, mouth watering, raw cotton!"
i know exactly what you are talking about. purchasing that sweet was banned at home when we were kids - 'who knows what viruses reside in that stuff?!' was the refrain we heard.
"He also thinks Codeine Robitussen was one bad @$$ girl and he is better off without her bad influence!"
like clinton, dad should be ok even if he sleeps with her, as long as he does not inhale. ;-)
- s.b.
Congratulations on the smart recovery after the tryst with the C girl !
May you be calorie rich ( of which the doubts are lesser ) and peace-full !
great post, glad you are feeling better.
I need to find your doc and get the same medication? What was it ;-)
V
Sundar, I think I might have lurked here before. Not sure. Been meaning to check your blog out after the meeting at UTBT's place, finally made it. Very nice blog and an amazing sense of humor. Adding to my reader...
This post was probably meant to be a serious one. But I am having one hell of a laugh. Sorry. Hope you are feeling better and enjoying seedai as a seedai...
visithra, according to the good doctor, it will take another week to get the voice back. but who cares? the taste buds are not complaining of working Overtime.
s.b. you crack me up man.. and no, I am not talking crack..
Kavi, I lost six pounds in seven days. If I could sell that virus in a bottle as a weight loss medicine with some "minor" side effects, could have made millions! The good eats are putting the pounds back on. It is gods way of leveling things out.
and by "things" I mean my belly of course!
Sivajini, doing a lot better now. thanks.
V. like I said the prescription was for Codeine Robitussen. It was a cough syrup laced with a powerful pain killer. Works magic.
http://www.medicinenet.com/guaifenesin_with_codeine-oral/article.htm
ddmom, thanks. I did not mean it as a serious post..always try to laugh everything off!
and yes... for those of you wondering what the hell really happened
1. got a virus from the kid
2. turned into a severe case of bronchitis
3. first doc gave nice dopey meds
4. meds dilated capillaries in lungs as well as in already sensitive nose and throat and ended up bleeding at SFO
5. second doc found a bacterial infection and gave antibiotics
6. that finally got daddy back to normal
7. cough is still lingering around but its effect is weakening and will be gone by next week
:)
when you put it in bullet points like that, it loses the fun in writing a post, doesnt it?
sundar:
"when you put it in bullet points like that, it loses the fun in writing a post, doesnt it?"
yup. it's like explaining a pj (or a 'kaiku') ;-).
- s.b.