Where I discover that I have a uvula

As happens on almost every other morning, I woke up today to the screaming of my cellphone alarm, regretting the alcoholic excesses of the previous night and hoping against hope that I had not reapplied the Mariah Carey theme to my Chrome browser while in a state of inebriation.

I turned off the alarm and switched sides in order to continue snoozing till such a time as any additional delay in waking up would put my job in jeopardy, when I noticed the unpleasant sensation peculiar to having something lodged inside your throat. Understandably so, I assumed it to be morning snot which I tried to swallow. It wouldn't go down. I put more effort into it. It just wouldn't budge. Concerned now, I sat up and tried to determine what was preventing the smooth execution of what is usually a relatively elementary bodily function. After a couple more tries and the object continuing its stubborn refusal to be flushed down the gullet, I finally decided that more drastic measures would be required. I shoved my finger inside my mouth and attempted to extricate whatever it was that was lodged inside my throat.

I came up with a mass of my own flesh.

Terrified, I ran to the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror and opened my mouth wide in an attempt to determine the nature of the calamity that appeared to have befallen me during the night.

You know that tiny dangly thing that hangs in front of your tonsils and hovers non-intrusively in the background that you only notice as you check out your teeth for pearliness and spinach? It was FUCKING HUGE. GIGANTIC.

HOOOOLYYY FUUUCCKKKK I screamed to myself, not loudly because I did not wish to wake up Ganesha (I had already named it after the Hindu God that it resembled in both size and physical appearance) and ran downstairs looking for my iPod touch. This was no time to be waiting for Windows Vista to boot up.

As I fired up the iPod browser in order to determine what was wrong with me, I realized that I had no idea what Ganesha was even known as in the medical community. So I typed in "dangly thing in front of throat" and sweet sweet Google ( BTW dear Google, if you're reading this and if you ever wish to use my house as a repository for hiding human remains and shit, CALL ME) immediately supplied me with its biological term. The UVULA.

Now I had something to go on. Still panicking sufficiently so as not to be able to appreciate the humor contained in the word "uvula", I typed "swollen uvula" into Google. And the very first link to appear was this blogpost.

"If you've woken up this morning with a swollen uvula then the best thing to do is eat lots of ice cream and just calm down" began the blogpost.

I immediately failed to calm down due to the realization that I was entirely out of icecream. But I continued to read on.

"Perhaps you were drinking lots of alcohol last night and may have been smoking too. You fell into bed, flat out unconscious and snored the night away motionless and unrousable. You were so knocked out you didn't realise that you were snoring like a pig and profoundly irritating your throat."

YES I said. I had indeed been drinking a lot and probably been snoring like a pig. Go on, said I to the Blogpost.

"You woke this morning with an incredibly dry and sore throat. So dry that no matter how much saliva you tried to swallow it still felt like sandpaper in the mojave desert. You had a drink of water... no relief. Oooh that sore throat, ouch! You looked in the bathroom mirror and opened your mouth wide and looked in. To your horror you noticed that wiggly little thing that hangs down at the back of your mouth was huge! Oh my God! It's all swollen up and you can actually feel it lying on your tongue! Shock! Horror! "What can I do?"

It was almost as if the Blogpost was reading my mind. Except it used the word "wiggly" instead of my preferred "dangly". Anyways, let's go with wiggly.

"First thing is.... DON'T PANIC! ...... calm down, relax, it's not just you, lots of people have this problem. Often due to dehydration the morning after too much booze and much more common in smokers. So just chill for a moment."

Finally, I stopped panicking. I chilled down and relaxed (or as assholes like to call it, chillaxed). And then I continued to read on.

Apparently this thing wasn't too bad. It was the result of a combination of post-binge-drinking-dehydration + pig-snoring. It would gradually subside in 8-12 hours. Ice-cream application and rehydration was recommended. And donations to the blog were welcomed.

I donated.

So anyways, I have a uvula. And so do you. And you need to take care of it.