Hiccups

“A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”

So sings Mary Poppins.

I always study the medical column in the New York Times Magazine with its tales of difficult-to-diagnose-cases and their ultimate solutions. Understandably, I’m usually lost until some smart doctor or nurse comes up with the answer and solves the problem.

Not so a couple of weeks ago. I may not have grasped the entire picture but I sure could have helped.  Long before the doctors did.

It seems that a man had been suffering from hiccups for days on end. He’d tried all the home remedies….drinking water upside down, holding his nose while drinking water, asking people to scare him, etc. He finally went to the hospital and they gave him a bunch of harsh drugs. He went home and kept on hiccupping.

Back to the hospital; more nasty drugs, MRI’s, Cat Scans, etc.

Poor guy still had hiccups. He was exhausted, losing weight, going crazy.

And I’m sitting there thinking: “Why isn’t someone simply giving this poor man a spoonful of sugar? “

Well, it turns out he did indeed have a little issue (way over my pay grade) that was part of an underlying cause of the hiccups and they fixed it. For the most part.

When he was going home from the hospital, still with more than a few hiccups, one of the nurses said: “You know, there’s a really simple cure for hiccups. Just put a spoonful of sugar under your tongue. Let it dissolve and Ta Da!  All gone!”

Finally, I said to myself, a little common sense.

And some seriously long-delayed comfort and peace for the poor hiccupper.

It works, by the way. If you didn’t already know.