In between picking my theme song for 2011 (which after 24 hours of the shitfest I've just been through - not so much) and Satan trying to kill me I’ve managed to wean myself off my nose spray addiction. 

For the third time.

Three times I’ve managed to get addicted to nose spray.  If that doesn’t pretty much sum me up in a nutshell I don’t know what does.

For the record, it’s relatively easy to become addicted to nose spray.  Especially if you like to do things like breathe.

The thing is it starts all innocuous and stuff….you get a cold and can't sleep with a plugged nose, not to mention the whole dried leather tongue, so you take a quick spray at night in order to sleep and not have your husband want to suffocate you with a pillow because of all the snoring, then a spray in the morning so you can eat without spitting all over everyone, then before you know it, a year and a half later you've built up the tolerance of an elephant and are telling your husband he should buy stocks in Otrivin while DMing 50 Cent to see if he can twitter it out. Clearly the pump and dump in 50 Cents life has a different meaning than in mine.

Your PSA for today: If used for more than two or three days at a time, nose spray does something called the “rebound effect”

Essentially you need more and more nose spray to get the same results.

See tolerance of an elephant above.

I googled nose spray addiction and apparently people are quite embarrassed to talk about this problem because all that came up were people on message boards from 2005 asking how to get off the nose spray. 

Thankfully my tolerance for humiliation is as high as my tolerance for nose spray which is why I’m willing to talk about it today.  There’s got to be someone out there who’s gotten addicted to nose spray besides me.  Yes?  Anyone? 

I tried to get off the nose spray cold turkey but after ten hours, I knew it wouldn’t work.  I couldn’t breathe and you know how when you’re outside in the wintertime and it’s all cold and your nose starts to drip non-stop and you’re trying to surreptitiously wipe away the drips with your mittens and/or sleeve? And yes it’s gross but you spent twenty minutes trying to get two kids into their snowsuits, boots, hats and mitts which is pretty much like trying to stuff an octopus into a string bag, and I’m supposed to remember Kleenex on top of all that? I’m just one person, people! So for the love of god stop judging me, I need to wipe! 

Ya...picture that. 

Only without the wintertime cold or being outside.  And me walking around with tissue stuffed up my nose. It wasn’t pretty. 

So I set about weaning myself off the nose spray using cold meds.  It took a few weeks because my weaning was taking place over the holidays and you can’t take medications and drink wine, not unless you want to be taking the first train to liver failure.

I’d be all cold medicated and breathing but then the next night I’d be going out to a holiday party so I wouldn’t take the cold meds and I’d be all stuffed up and nose sprayee again. 

My timing wasn’t impeccable....just saying.

But I finally did it and have now been nose spray free for about a week.

If you too are addicted to nose spray, I’m putting it out there that I don’t recommend my cold med weaning process to anyone because I’m not a doctor.  Nor do I play one on t.v.

Also because my next step is meth to get off the cold meds.