La Estupida

Caveat: If you are in the least bit squeamish, do not read further.

I used to be a smart person.

I mean, I think I was. Can anyone confirm this?

I distantly remember getting a 4.0 GPA in high school and a 3.9 in college. As far as I know, I somehow managed to at least appear intelligent.

I don’t know what has happened to that girl.

Lately, I feel so…so…stupefied.

For example, Brett and I went over to Mom and Gary’s for dinner last night. We enjoyed a delicious baked spaghetti dish (recipe ala Alice) with Mom, Gary, and my cousins, Candice and BJ. Beautiful Brielle was on hand for the first part of the evening entertaining us with her new drum set.

Side note – as Brielle’s not-aunt and former high school drummer myself, I am proud to see my not-niece carrying on my family tradition of making loud percussion noises in no particular rhythm.

As we sat around talking pre-dinner, waiting for BJ to arrive, I was telling Candice about my latest nausea medication debacle. I told her my “brilliant” idea of taking only one pill in the morning and having to suffer only 4 hours of drowsiness, as compared to all day.

My sweet cousin then proceeded to astound me when she said, “Why don’t you cut the pill in half and just take a half? Then, the drowsiness would be gone by the time you got to work.”

Now, that’s brilliant.

I just stared at her, thinking, “She’s a genius!” Before realizing that for most normal people (of which I used to be one), that would the next logical step. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t even thought…nay, even considered it. Ever.

In the course of four months of non-stop vomiting, I never thought about splitting a pill. Not once.

See what I mean when I say my brain cells are deserting me en masse?

My second point of evidence came later in the evening. After the amazing dinner, dessert, and a rousing game of three-team Sequence, Brett and I decided to stop by Hilander on our way home.

I had a list from my OB’s office of some foods and items that are supposed to naturally help curb nausea. The first was ginger snaps. We couldn’t find any ginger snaps, but we did find Newman’s Own Ginger O’s cookies in the organic aisle.

Next, we picked up organic ginger ale with natural brewed ginger in the ingredients (this is how specific my list was). From there, we headed to the spice aisle to purchase crystallized ginger.

We couldn’t find the last item on the list, ginger tablets. We were informed we may have to go to a health food store for those.

The price tag for our three items that MIGHT stop nausea? A whopping $30! I’ll tell you what. They darn well better work.

On our way out of the store, I started feeling nauseous and actually had to throw up a little in the parking lot. With my pregnancy being the way it is, I find myself throwing up in a lot of parking lots.

I’m getting a really good handle on what it feels like to be a homeless drunk.

So, understandably, once we got home, I was anxious to try one of the “natural” remedies. My first thought was the crystallized ginger.

Earlier in the day, I’d had a discussion with my OB’s nurse on what items could be natural remedies for my nausea, to balance out the side-effect-heavy meds. She’d given me a full list, heavy on the ginger, with an emphasis on the crystallized ginger.

“It’s usually quite sweet, due to the sugar, and it’s concentrated, so it should be a big help,” she told me.

So, standing in my kitchen, I unscrewed the top of the bottle and shook out a pea sized granule of crystallized ginger into my hand. Brett and I examined it curiously.

The next sequence of events happened simultaneously.

I asked Brett, “How do you think I’m supposed to take it?”

Just as Brett was responding with, “You should probably dissolve it in some tea,” I impulsively popped the granule in my mouth and started to CHEW IT.

I’m not sure what I thought would happened. Perhaps, I’d been misled by the OB nurse who said it would be “sweet.”

Instead, I got a mouthful of concentrated ginger that was so strong; it literally gave me a full body shudder. The taste was so foul I started hopping on one foot and making a face that Brett generously described later as a “grimace.”

I had a two second warning, giving me plenty of time to race to the sink and watch the rest of Mom’s dinner go down the drain.

As I stood there, hunched over and panting in the afterglow, Brett rubbed my back and said, not-so-helpfully, “Maybe you should have dissolved it in some tea.”

“You think?” I spit back sarcastically before re-retching in the sink.

This morning, as I relayed both incidents to a co-worker, she looked right at me and said, “Why didn’t you just swallow it? I mean, it is the size of a pill, right? That way, you wouldn’t have to taste it, and it could dissolve harmlessly in your stomach.”

I unloaded another you-are-a-genius 1000 watt stare, before (yet again) realizing it was thought that should have flashed OBVIOUS, OBVIOUS in my head.

“Of course, swallow it whole! What was I thinking?” I said in consternation.

“Sweetheart,” said my not-raised-in-the-South but still Southern accented co-worker. “Y’all don’t have to think. You’re pregnant. Those brain cells are going to the baby.”

Well, at least someone’s benefitting from them.

Now what’s my blog address again?