Important Ouch Update

Do you sometimes have that thing where it feels like your lung sort of sticks to itself, and it hurts kind of a lot when you breathe in, but you have to try to inhale really deeply anyway to unstick it?

I love that thing. By which I mean, I love when it goes away.

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Ow. Headache.

We wisely and unfortunately did not buy tons of candy for Halloween this year (wise because we never get any Trick-or Treaters and now we're not left with tons of candy, unfortunate because we're not eating tons of candy right now).

And as anticipated, not a single child came to our door, which is actually too bad, because that lucky child could have been treated to something fun we scrounged up on the spot, like the ever-popular apple (everyone loves to get an apple at Halloween!), or maybe a handful of loose raisins.

"Here, kid. Take 'em and git."

Not that the kid would have been allowed to eat loose raisins even if they wanted to (which they almost certainly would not), because we could have poisoned them or something. If we had any poison lying around. Which you never can put past us. A lot of cleaning products have nasty ingredients.

The point is, no Trick-or-Treaters, but I'll keep my eye peeled (and my ears pricked) for monsters and ghosts as the night draws on.

Meantime, I've been watching TV on Hulu (because the regular TV was tuned to sporting events in which I have limited interest unless someone is getting eaten by monsters--and you'd think on Halloween there'd be a good chance of that, but no), and I have kind of a concentration headache from staring at the tiny screen.

Terrifying?

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And Speaking of Sociological Images...

Because that site is addictive--this time my thoughts are provoked by a piece on boys and girls bikes.

As you may know, pretty much the only structural difference (setting aside the many possible varieties of gendered accessories, decorations and color schemes) is that boys bikes--or diamond frame bikes, or 'regular' bikes--have a top bar between the seat and the handlebars, like so:

Photo credit mars_discovery_district under Creative Commons license

--while girls bikes, or 'step-through' bikes, do not, like so:

Photo credit landotter under Creative Commons license

The added bar on the diamond frame seems to give the frame some extra stability (or so I would assume, not being a bicycle expert), while the lower bar on the step-through bike allows for, well, stepping through to get on, rather than having to swing your leg over the top.

It was designed for women, because women tended to wear heavy skirts in the early days of bicycling, which are more difficult (and shocking!) to swing over the higher bar of the other frame style.

And of course now you could not pay many boys to ride a girls bike, even through, objectively, there isn't that much difference between the two, and most girls probably don't bicycle in heavy skirts anymore anyway.

One interesting thing (and this is totally related to health!) is that, objectively speaking, the step-through frame, with its lack of a sturdy bar right there perilously close to groin level, would seem to make a lot more sense for boys.

I mean, even as a woman I can say from personal experience that if you happen to stop short or go over a bump or otherwise lose your equilibrium in some fashion and land hard on that bar, it's a whole big barrel of no fun.

Basically, smashing yourself in the crotch with a metal bar is no picnic for anybody. Heed these words of wisdom, good people!

Given the special male sensitivity to threats to that general area, you'd think they'd be cool with a bicycle structure that did not place a metal bar right in prime crotch-smashing range. But no, they'd rather risk the most horrific pain many men can imagine, than ride a girls bike.

Hey, at least risking horrific pain is manly.

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Tee Hee

I see on Our Bodies Our Blog that the American College of Nurse Midwives has released a position statement in support of nitrous oxide as an option for women in labor.

Rachel, the post's author, heroically refrains from making a horrible joke about how labor pain is no laughing matter. I am apparently not so strong.

The statement says that nitrous oxide is commonly used in other countries and offers a number of benefits to women, including safety, effectiveness, and ease of administration and discontinuation.

In general, having a variety of options available for pain relief sounds good to me, so I'll throw my massive armies of clout behind the proposal.

Laughing gas for the laboring masses!
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Oh, How We Suffer!

I am distressed to hear from Well about this downside to the overall awesomeness of life as a redhead: apparently, we don't respond as readily to anesthetic as people with hair of other hues.

The speculation is that a gene mutation associated with red hair is also linked to pain receptors, making the bearers of said genes more sensitive to pain and less responsive to anesthesia. The story specifically discusses the possibility that redheads may be less likely to go to the dentist than other people, perhaps because it's more painful for them.

Distressed though I am on behalf of my color family, I'm not sure I myself got my red from this particular mutation, since I've never noticed that I'm more sensitive to painful stimuli than my dark-haired friends and sisters. In fact, I'm punching myself in the head right now, just for fun!

OK, that part is untrue.

I've never avoided the dentist due to fear of pain, though, and have found the anesthetic used on me to be quite effective. More than once I've bitten half through my lip in the aftermath of a dental procedure because I couldn't feel it (when it's numb, isn't a lip pretty much twice as big as usual, and always in the way of whatever you're trying to say or eat or sip cautiously through a straw?)

More research is clearly called for, given that this is a topic of such obvious importance to the world.

In the meantime, dentists, if you have red-haired patients, give them some extra drugs. Maybe that's what my dentists have been doing with me, and I never knew.

Oh, hey, I did need an extra dose of anesthetic drops at my last eye exam, where they touch that thing to your eyeball to measure the pressure. I kept involuntarily flinching because I could feel it touching. It didn't hurt, exactly, but it felt weird enough that I couldn't keep my head still.

Maybe my variant of the red gene is extra sensitive to eyeball touches, but not tooth pain. I'm telling you, we need more research!