The Pain Up Your Nose
The Pain Up Your Nose
One morning in your 40s you might wake up with a ping on your face. A little pinch, if you will. It’s probably nothing, but you go to the mirror to investigate. Perhaps it’s one of those little zits wedged on the outside of your nostril. Or an infinitesimally small speck of fiberglass. Or maybe you got a nose ring the day before and forgot about it.
You don’t find anything. And so you go about your day, all the while realizing that the ping in your nose is growing in fervor and is now a full blown piercing pain. You press down on it, you push it, you pull it. Your coworkers think you are trying to physically, with your hands, to suppress the flu, and they back away from you and reapply hand sanitizer every time they see you.
When you get home from work you get a flashlight out to investigate. You’ll try to simultaneously light the dark nasal passage and probe the sides. Why is it so impossible to look up your own nose? Maybe you make an elaborate ricocheting ring of mirrors, set up at odd angles around your face, all over your bathroom, to try to capture the reflection. What are you, a one woman NASA space station on Mars? You’re not. You want one of those tiny dental hygienist mirrors, but where on earth do you get those? The Dental Hygienist Supply Store? You can buy a lemongrass turkey burger candle from Bed Bath and Beyond right this second, but one singular dental hygienist mirror? No chance. No place sells devices to the public to look up one’s nose. No matter what you do, you cannot see what is causing this pain.
It hurts. It hurts like a… like a giant, festering, unpoppable zit inside your nose. And that’s exactly what it is. If the indignity of a zit on your face or your back or your chest or some other weird place wasn’t enough, now you have a zit on the interior of your body. It’s like the zit of a lifetime, too. Like to pop it would be so gratifying you wouldn’t ever need another raise at work. You wouldn’t need your kids to graduate high school or thank you or offer anything approaching appreciation for making homemade freakin’ broth for their soup. You wouldn’t need that one compliment from your husband you get once a decade because you have already been blessed with this, “the big one”. You wouldn’t need your parents to acknowledge your career choice. You wouldn’t even need a seat on the Metro. Because you would have the memory of popping this DefCon 4 mega zit, and the undeniable, unforgettable catharsis thereafter.
But you can’t have that, because you can’t see this zit, you can’t reach this zit, you can’t do anything but endure the wrath of the inside-the-nose hurty pimple. You might press a warm compress to it, but forget about it! The aging mutant hormones that created this monster are impervious to hot washcloths! You can’t put zit cream up there because of the gasoline singed feeling up your sinus cavity that your outdated, generic brand zit cream would cause. Think the that zit hurts? Try benzoil peroxide dripping down the back of your throat.
You are at the mercy of the inner nose zit. You can try to find a distraction, something wholesome and clean like Fixer Upper on HGTV, watching people who sleep in cryogenic chambers so it looks like they’ve defied aging, but guess what: Joanna Gaines is gonna get an inner nose zit one day. She is. She’s going to turn 41 and she’ll get a inner nostril sealed volcano. Sure, she’ll do it while lounging on a French Country chaise with some cursive “Live Love Laugh” written in chalkboard paint behind her. Maybe her five kids will offer her organic farm salves they made themselves. Maybe Chip will try to look up her nose to find the source, and maybe he’ll grab his blowtorch and see if he might incinerate the thing himself. But of course he can’t. Her face is insured and the blowtorch would do more damage than waiting out the nose zit will.
You turn the channel. Maybe you decide to binge eat or drink or exercise to not think about the complexion problems inside your nose, but good luck, buddy. Good friggin’ luck. Nothing can’t help you now. You’re in your forties, and this shit is normal now.