HicHULP!cups

You can write about a tramatic experience only after you have lived to tell about it and make humor from it. So that's what I'm doing now.

Friday night I woke up at approximately 3 am with possibly the worst case of hiccups in recent history. Then again I can't say I remember the last time I had them, but still when you're losing sleep over it you know it's a problem. Much like the common cold there is no definitive cure for the hiccups, but each person has their own home remedies to cure them which I soon employed:

1) Hold your breath

I did this on and off for about 20 minutes and all it gave me was a headache. This would effective if I had hiccups underwater.

2) Get scared

This is totally ineffective because A) I don't own a single horror/thriller movie, and B) Even if I did I would know where all the scary parts are. This would only work if I were taken hostage by rogue mercenaries with a $10 billion pricetag on my head. Imagine the hiccup-induced hostage tape: "Mom! HULP! Send Van Damme! HULP! and moHULP money! Like $10 billion!"

3) Drink a glass of water

This works depending on the veracity of the hiccup. If it's mild to moderate it would work, but considering the life-threatening condition I was in I'm sure it would have lead to me becoming the coolest kid in Billy Madison's class. Someone I knew once drank 5 glasses and still didn't get cured, but thankfully his kidneys received an extensive workout.

4) Stash away everything that reminds you of her

...wait, that's a home remedy for getting over a break up. Hang on, I'm off topic.

5) Eat granulated sugar

This is the method I used at the Saturday morning play practice I attended on two hours of sleep. According to my aunt who has an extensive medical background but does not play a doctor on TV, the sugar zaps all the trapped air bubbles in your system thus curing it in the process. In addition the sugar would keep me awake until I crash, hopefully in the bed and not in the car on the ride home. After 6 packets it would appear the condition was cured.

Or so I thought.

Upon arriving back home they started back up again and this time I was running out of options. Thus in the process I got online and checked out everyone's favorite medical journal, Wikipedia.

The Wiki entry for hiccups presented me with information on where it happends, how it happends, and so forth. The main information I needed to know was how to cure this ailment. Wiki had the answer:

"Ordinary hiccups are cured easily without medical intervention; in most cases they can be stopped simply by forgetting about them."

Well that's useless. Here I am trying to cure the hiccups by not thinking about the hiccups when in fact I'm thinking about not thinking about the hiccups, essentially thinking about the hiccups. Confused? I'm not explaining it.

After reading the entry I figured a nap would cure it and in fact in did. But before I exit this entry, I checked further down to the more extreme cases, the intractable hiccups:

"Hiccups are treated medically only in severe and persistent (termed "intractable") cases...Effective treatment with sedatives often requires a dose that renders the person either unconscious or highly lethargic."

So while the hiccups can't kill you, they can in effective make you feel close to death. Continuing on lead me to this comedy gold mine:

"In 2006, Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine received an Ig Nobel prize for medicine after he published "Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage" in 1988.^[1] In an attempt to block the runaway messages on the vagus nerve, Fesmire found that stimulation of the vagus nerve by digital rectal massage worked, stopping a bout of hiccupping. Fesmire also commented "An orgasm results in incredible stimulation of the vagus nerve."

Digital Rectal Massage. Side effects may include moistening of the pants, headache, nausea, and loss of blood pressure. See your doctor if you are pregnant, taking heart medication, or drink more than 5 alcoholic beverages per day. Expect the commercials for that to include nature, a couple, and hobbies like all the other prescription commericals on TV.

While the name no doubt will mess with you, let's break it down. "Rectal" would obviously imply the anus, so that's covered. "Digital" does not exactly mean a computer probes you, but rather the fingers on your hands are called digits.

Thereby, the cure for hiccups is to scratch your own ass. BRILLIANT!

No wonder this guy won an award. Now if only he can cure that orgasm side effect...