Spring break stories

I spent some time in Tennessee and North Carolina last week. Near Nashville, I visited The Hermitage (Andrew Jackson's estate). It was a little pricey. I noted the irony to my wife: seeing the estate necessitated the confiscation of most of the portraits of Andrew Jackson from my wallet.

The scale of the Jackson estate was a couple notches down from The Biltmore (George Vanderbilt estate), which has 250 rooms totaling about 170,000 square feet. The funniest thing I saw there though really had nothing to do with the house itself. I was on a tour of some of the back hallways and balcony areas. On one part of the tour we went up a dimly lit, narrow stairway to emerge on the roof next to a copper dome that capped the huge spiral staircase. It was clear and sunny that day. As I emerged into the light, a mother and her teenaged daughter were huddled over on the left, both having a little sneezing fit. The dad explained drily, "sun sneezes". What an odd reflex reaction! And an inherited trait to boot!

I'll tell you about another funny malady I heard about on my trip. It's funny partly because most sufferers inflict it upon themselves, as I shall explain. An emergency room nurse turned me on to the affliction known as "Saturday Night Palsy." Medically, Saturday Night Palsy is compression of the radial nerve (on the inner part of your forearm). Naturally, if you press on that too long, you'll lose feeling and motor control of your hand. So where does the name come from? Well, it would seem to originate from the legions of amateur drinkers who tie one on over the weekend and then flop over to sleep it off (much of their body weight pressing on an arm pinned underneath). The same thing can happen to a drunk slumped into an armchair: the persistent pressure of a chair arm propping up the limb will produce the effect. When the person comes to the next day and feeling doesn't come back to the hand quickly enough, the patient begins to wonder whether he didn't seriously injure himself during his drunken -- and possibly unremembered -- escapades. An emergency room visit ensues, as does another diagnosis of Saturday Night Palsy.