Trust me, I'm a doctor

So ... you visit your GP because you have what looks like a mild infection in an old would on your right leg and you're given Cephalexin. That seems fair enough, although I don't really like taking drugs. But Dr Mann tells me the antibiotic will assist not only the old wound but clear up my urinary tract, which I think has something to do with my sweating.

Then you start up a conversation about parenting (maybe) at some unspecified point in the medium term future, which means some time before I'm dead - an event that could occur almost any day ... meteor strike on Ashfield, run over by the proverbial bus (although I don't see how any bus would fit in the lift to reach the fourth floor) or, if I'm truly unlucky, I could simply spontaneously combust ... you know ... explode, right here; right now!

.... fortunately that didn't happen just then but, it turns out, an exploding Dougie is not quite as fanciful as it seems.

Conception requires sperm and an egg. Sperm, as we know, comes from where it comes from (for which all boys are eternally grateful to the Cosmic Biologist for the way He's organised things ... whoever conceived - pardon the pun - of ejaculation, by the way, HAD to be male). Anyway ... in high-level quads there is a risk of an autonomic dysreflexic response to ejaculation. The details don't matter but a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I had such a moment of crisis. Did the Earth move for you Dougie? Move? It nearly crushed me to death ... as the hospital staff will testify.

So, given that I'm a quad and given that one has broached the subject of conception with one's not-girlfriend and given that the whole idea has not been immediately laughed out of court as evidence of an old man's barking madness, one naturally raises the topic of sperm, ejaculation, autonomic dysreflexia and possible death with one's GP. Her advice is to experiment cautiously. (And if that's not a something of a dampner on one's ego driven proclivity to procreate wildly I don't know what is). To be on the safe side, however, I'm prescribed with a Nitrolingual Pumpspray. Two skooshes under the tongue in any moment of autonomic dysreflexic crisis swiftly lowers the blood pressure but don't ask me how ... speaks sternly to it maybe.

So that's comforting ...

... until you open up Google.

It turns out that my Nitrolingual Pump SL-Spray 400 mcg/dose goes by the name (in brackets in smaller type) of Glyceryl Trinitrate Pump ... better known to you and me as nitroglycerene, which (according to Wiki) "in its undiluted form ... is one of the more powerful explosives ... [which] makes it highly dangerous to transport or use."


Nitroglycerene doctor? Ah well, the things we do for love.

Kaboom!!!!