hic!

i have the hiccups.

my hiccups are the classic “hic!” sound. and when i do it my whole upper body goes up. sometimes i even make the “hic-uk!” sound. it’s probably the only thing i do the traditional way—besides my practices of medicine and music.

it used to be that when i got the hiccups, i’d have them on and off for days. days, i tell you. on and off.

startling me does not stop my hiccups. it just makes me mad. making me scared has worked though—one of my scary teachers once worked her cure on me by getting real up close in my personal space and interrogating me about something i can’t remember what but i was so frightened i went into fight-or-flight which probably changed my sympathetic-parasympathetic tone balance and stopped my random phrenic nerve firings and therefore my hiccups. and once i ate a cube of sugar and that stopped my hiccups successfully for some reason. i also hear that a good long kiss stops hiccups. makes sense. but i’ve never had a boyfriend and the hiccups at the same time, so i haven’t gotten to try it out yet. maybe next time i’ll just grab a stranger and see.

sometimes hiccups mean something is seriously wrong inside your abdomen. on the rare occasion it’s an actual medical condition, it is often that something is wrong with the spleen. it's not because of the spleen itself; it's because of where the spleen is. because it’s so cosy with the diaphragm. nevermind. don’t you dare go running to the doctor and asking about if your spleen is okay next time you get hiccups, you freakin’ hypochondriacs. don’t do it! and all babies hiccup a lot. don’t ask why, they just do. so don’t bring them to the e.r. for it. i only wrote this paragraph because i wanted to write the word "spleen" anyway.

when i was a kid they used to say that the hiccups meant you were growing. that’d be awesome. you see, i lack about three inches in my tib-fibs for them to be proportionate with my femurs and with the rest of my body. that’s three inches taller that i should be. that's three inches of top shelf that i can't reach. that’s three inches i have to cut off the bottoms of my pant legs when i buy outside of the “petite” section.

so instead, i’m just hiccuping with no consequence except that it sounds “cute”, which takes away from my credibility as a professional.

dang-hic!-it.