I thought nosebleeds were for kids! And I never had one in my life, until about two hours ago, when I wondered why, as I was reading Mary Antin and preparing tomorrow's American Immigrant Writers class while telling my daughter to start her violin practice, that my nose was running. And then I thought of the moment in the 1970 French thriller, Le Boucher, when the children are at a picnic with their nice, but it turns out not so nice schoolteacher, and one of them says, "Il pleut! Il pleut rouge!" ("It's raining! It's raining red!") and then all sorts of complications develop. Fortunately my nose did exactly what the website said it would do if the blood was coming from only one nostril and if I sat up straight, pinched my nostrils together for ten minutes, and applied a cold pack to the back of my neck. Which I did, while instructing my daughter to keep playing scales, and dabbing at the flow with a Kleenex. I have to admit I also remembered the opening death from a nosebleed in one of the many unusual scenes supplying corpses to the funeral home in Six Feet Under (they were so inventive! Remember the compacted waste from an airplane hitting a woman standing in front of her front door?)
But, gentle reader, my nosebleed stopped after ten minutes. Why would somebody like me who eats right, gets plenty of exercise, and a reasonable amount of sleep have a nosebleed at fifty-seven? Is it that I'm using too much garlic and fresh ginger in my cooking? They're blood thinners, you know. Maybe I should just go back to globs of butter on my bread and hunks of cheese and meat on rolls. A traditional German Abendbrot, that is. Feel free to advise me.
P.S. My blood pressure is normal: 125 over 80, and I just checked, yes, and pulse is fine.
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