Hot Flash Horror

After watching a commercial on TV, about a Hot Flash clinical study, I recalled when my own hot flashes created so much trouble for me.

To relieve some of the hot flash discomfort I began wearing a minimum of clothing. In fact, I mostly wore a short cotton gown…just a short cotton gown. The first time the hot flashes were arriving, one right after the other, was when I was updating my kitchen floor. I was putting down a new color of tile; a nice peel and stick Armstrong.

I was flashing, constantly, on the day I was putting down the tile. It was not long before I was in ‘just’ the cotton gown while sitting flat and placing the super sticky squares. Every now and then I would peel the paper from a tile and one corner would break off. I carelessly sat one of these aside and used another tile. I had one tile to place before I would be finished and, unfortunately, the last discarded broken tile was on the wrong side of me, sticky side up. I scooted over and plopped my chubby, bare, bottom right smack in the middle of that high quality, nothing-will-make-this-sucker-come-unstuck, Armstrong tile.

You can imagine just how much was exposed when I, sans underwear, suddenly plopped flat on top of a sticky floor tile. When I tried to stand up, everything that had been spread in the sit down position wanted to naturally move into the stand up position. This is totally impossible when one square foot of a sticky floor tile is preventing the transition! Down I went, again, capturing even more than I had the first time. I stood up, sort of, which created the pull of things that would normally only be pulled while wearing a two sided, duct tape thong. I could not stand up straight; my elbows rested against my knees.

A friend of mine once told me that WD-40 would remove the ‘sticky’ from anything; my can of WD-40 was in the trunk of my car. It took an eternity to crab walk down three front steps and twenty five feet to my car. I did not think to take my car keys with me and, of course, the car was locked. Crap! I had to crab walk back to the house, grab the keys, crab crawl back to the car for the WD-40 and slowly, and painfully, return to the house of torture.

When I reached the bathroom, elbows still resting on knees, I began to spray the WD-40. I tried looking to see where I was spraying but the spray residue began coating my glasses; I was blind. Blood began rushing to my head, from bending over, and I began to feel faint. WD-40 was all over the floor and getting very, very, slick. Somehow, I missed hitting my butt with the spray! I decided to run the bathtub full of hot water to see if I could soak off the tile. The minute my WD-40 coated feet hit the bottom of the tub they went out from under me and I nearly drowned trying to get in an upright position. All of the thrashing around in the tub caused some of my skin to peel away, from me - not the tile, and after awhile I was able to remove, little piece by little piece, the Armstrong tile from hell. Vaseline became my new best friend.

I now keep WD-40 under the kitchen sink and park five feet from the front door - all because of hot flashes. This is the hot flash story Armstrong, and I, are sticking with.