Coagulate: (v) to change a fluid into a solid

Every once in a while, my silly little boy shows up to take over my manly frame.

For what I hope is a brief time, I start thinking like a child or an adolescent instead of taking advantage of the library of my journey.

One day I convinced myself I was having a heart attack. Of course, the more I considered that my heart was being attacked, the more abundantly symptoms leaped to the forefront to do their best imitation, trying to reinforce my foolishness.

Eventually I found it necessary to drive to the emergency room and check in.

Well, nobody questioned my contention because…well, because I’m fat. After all, that’s what fat people do. They eat too much cake and pizza and have heart attacks. Since I wasn’t eating, the possibility of cardiac arrest was available.

So they put me on a treatment while they tried to figure out what to do with me. One of the things they gave me was an anti-coagulant. This is a drug that keeps your blood from clotting. I didn’t think anything about it.

But when it turned out that I had mingled a case of indigestion with an anxiety attack to simulate a cardiac event, they sent me home. They offered one warning: “Keep in mind, if you cut yourself, it’ll be very difficult to stop the bleeding.”

I ignored them.

That evening when I went into my bathroom to shave, I did nick myself. I put a little piece of toilet paper on it, as gents often do, but it continued to bleed down my neck, over and over and over again.

I do not know when it eventually coagulated, because I had to lay down and wrap it in gauze.

Whatever they intended for that particular drug was very effective.

I could not coagulate.

So as it turns out, on that particular day my greatest danger was not having a heart attack, but rather, bleeding to death from shaving.