The Pros and Cons of Neti Pots. Plus, A Camp Horror Story!

Ester: Nicole! Happy Morning-on-the-West-Coast to you.

Nicole: Happy afternoon back atcha!

Ester: So the topic of neti pots came up — appropriately, I suppose, as it is cold and flu season and they are a cheap way of maintaining health — and you said something astonishing. Would you care to share with the group?

Nicole: As anyone who has had a yoga practice for a bazillion years might do, I eventually discovered the neti pot. It’s a pot, short and stout, with a handle and a spout. The spout goes in your nose, and you pour a special kind of saline water through your nose to flush out all the snot and impurities and stuff.

Ester: As Dr. Spaceman once said, Everything about this is disgusting. Please proceed.

Nicole: Oh, it gets even more disgusting. The reason I stopped using the neti pot has to do with the amoeba Naegleria fowleri. This amoeba literally eats your brain. It is colloquially known as the “brain-eating amoeba.”

And it can live in certain public water supplies.

Ester: (faintly) Go on … (I can already tell my getting-Giardia-in-Russia story is going to be nothing compared to this.)

Nicole: Oh, if we want to talk about intestinal bugs I have gobs of stories. But back to N. fowleri.

So most of the time N. fowleri lives in ponds and rivers and places that are not your bathroom water faucet. However, when the big N. fowleri scare started, it was kind of like they couldn’t prove it wasn’t in the water supply. No guarantees. It probably wasn’t, but you could never be sure. And since one of the only ways you could get the amoeba into your brain was if you snorted it up your nose, well… the neti pot suddenly decreased in popularity.

Ester: Oh. Sure! So I can stop holding my breath now? You did not actually contract a brain-eating baddie?

Nicole: Oh my goodness no, I’d be dead. Buzzfeed has a great story on one of the few people to survive this.

Ester: Anti-climax! I thought you beat it off through frugality and sheer force of will. OK, well, I’ve never used a neti pot and now I won’t, ever. I did trip over a sewer when I was at summer camp and sneaking over at nighttime to see my boyfriend in another bunk. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, just slapped a band-aid on my toe. The next morning, though, this thing on my toe had swollen to the size of a cauliflower: a pulsing, purple-ish cauliflower. Turns out sewers are rather dirty.

Nicole: That is like the camp song! “I rolled into a sewer, and that is where I died…”

Ester: I have never heard this camp song! All my camp songs were in Hebrew. Anyway, two friends had to help me limp to the nurse’s office, where the nurse nearly had an aneurysm at the sight of me. Another nurse came out and they started shouting at each other. “It’s infected! Call the doctor!” “There’s no time!” “Hold her down!” It was like being in a surgery scene in a movie about the Civil War. “Get the anesthesia!” “THERE’S NO TIME.” “HOLD HER, HOLD HER.” It was great.

Nicole: I could not even imagine what having a toe the size of a cauliflower would feel like. That is incredible.

Ester: It was so sensitive that I couldn’t even put a sock on, so you can imagine how it felt when shaking camp nurses took a scalpel to it. Anyway! I survived, and I didn’t even lose the toe.

Nicole: Also good. So wait, was it the size of a cauliflower floret, or of the whole head? I am very concerned about this!

Ester: It was like a cauliflower compared to the rest of my toes. In all honesty the growth — which is what it was, an infectious pulsing alien growth over the infected cut — was probably only the size of a floret. But I was 13 and nothing bad had ever happened in my life; it looked terrifying to me.

Nicole: It is terrifying no matter how old you are. Infections are no joke.

Ester: Yeah. Anyway. We’re probably supposed to be talking about money. But does anyone have any exciting injury stories to share?

Nicole: I had a foot surgery that took me, like, two years to pay off! But I’ll save that story for another time.

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