Standing in the shower the other morning, shampooing my hair (1), I'm a bit confused when I look down at my hand and it seems to have changed colour.
The shampoo is clear so why is it suddenly red? It takes me a minute to work it out. I've got a nose bleed. Again.
Big scarlet poppy blooms of blood are plopping on to my palm and on to the white ceramic floor of the shower. All of a sudden, it looks like the shower scene from Psycho.
I get myself out, grab a wad of toilet paper and once the blood flow has eased I stuff a pellet of scrunched-up tissue up my left nostril in a bid to absorb any remaining claret. I spend the next two days trying to get it back down again.
This is the first nosebleed I've had in ages. When I was younger, in my twenties, they used to be a regular occurrence. I twice had to get my nose cauterised as a result.
My memory is that a doctor at Stirling Royal Infirmary would stick a sulphur stick up my nose and burn the popped blood vessel. It was necessary then because I was constantly bleeding; at home, at work, on trains, planes and automobiles (a nuisance if you're driving at the time). I was a bleeding liability, in every sense.
The problem has eased over the years. Maybe once or twice a year now I'll have to get my hanky out. It's too irregular to be a nuisance. Except on the blood-letting day itself. On this particular day in question, I mention that I'd had a nosebleed to someone I'm interviewing (I'm paranoid that the tissue paper up my nose is distorting my profile). "It's nothing," I say. She doesn't look convinced. "Maybe you should go to a doctor." It hadn't occurred to me. It rarely does.
I've been to my doctor maybe five or six times in the past 15 years (2). I always think I'll be better the next day. I'm usually right. This is a dangerous attitude, I realise. And a typically male one. What's worse is it's not even that I'm embarrassed to ask for help. It's more that I'm too lazy. Pathetic really. Anyway, I'm still breathing as I write this. So that's a good sign.
For two days after the shower I'm tasting and smelling the metallic tang of rusty blood. But walking down Lothian Road in Edinburgh I sneeze and dislodge the tissue up my nose. Having circled my sinuses it bobs up in the back of my mouth. At first I think it's a last globule of phlegmy blood, but my taste buds soon tell me otherwise. What does toilet paper that's been up your nose for two days taste like? Chewy.
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