OK, unless you’re using an oscilloscope, you can’t actually see sound. However, some sounds are just gross.
Catarrh. Yes, that’s a thing. I have an intimate relationship with it.
Did you know that the body makes a quart of mucous each day? Presumably it helps to clean air passages, but do we really need that much? Doesn’t matter. We get what we get, and it’s cheaper than buying air filters.
(For those old enough or with an appropriately perverse, i.e., British, sense of humor, can you envision a Monty Python routine about a nose wash service? “Do you want the standard wash or the sinus special?”)
Most of us simply swallow the excess and think nothing of it. For some of us, we get more than we can handle, or a polyp can impede the flow, or an infection or allergy can thicken the flow. It’s annoying and results in all sorts of odd and largely unpleasant sounds as we try to clear the passageway in order to eat or breathe.
Breathing is rather important, don’t you think? So’s eating, even if many of us tend to do that too much.
Certain foods can aggravate mucous or increase the amount we produce, most particularly, spicey food, caffeine and alcohol. So doctors suggest we abstain from those.
Like that’s going to happen.
All I can ask is that those of us with the problem try to be as discrete about it as possible, and the rest be as charitable as possible. We’re really not trying to annoy you, and catarrh is at least as bothersome to us as it is to you!
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