DIAMONDS IN MY NOSE

No, I haven't been getting much sleep. I wake up in the night not able to breath through my nose. My tongue gets dry and cracked; I wake; I can’t get back to sleep.

For a long time I didn’t think much of it, but it kept getting worse. This might not sound strange, but you haven’t heard the beginning of strange. When I wake my nose is full of obstructions. The boogers I’m picking are real gems. I kid you not. They are perfect diamonds.

I even took them to a jewelry store. The man put them under a microscope and didn’t want to give them back. He said he had never seen such flawless diamonds. I wouldn’t tell him where I got them from and sold them for a nice chunk of change.

Before you think that this is a blessing, think again. The diamonds are up to a carat in weight, and the loss of sleep has me hearing voices and seeing things. I'm even afraid to tell anyone about it for fear that I‘ll wind up as an experiment in a laboratory.

At last I went to a priest who didn’t believe me until I showed him the diamonds. He made an appointment for me to see a psychiatrist who happens to have a degree in bio-chemistry.
He got right to the point. “How can I help you?” When I told him my story he asked if I use drugs or drink.
“I don’t use drugs, I don’t smoke and I don’t drink, unless you count coffee.”
“And just how much coffee do you drink? “
I answered, “Two or three pots a day. It’s not cheap. I pay $25 per pound. It would be even more, but I buy it in bulk. It’s really the only vice I have. It is made from a very special bean from the mountain sides of South Africa.”
At this, something captured his interest. He took blood samples, tissue scrapings and hair clippings. I figured that it would be a week or two before I would find anything out, but he had a lab in his office. Over and over he stopped what he was doing to look up my nose with a light scope.

I had plenty of doubts, but what else was I to do?



Finally he gave me his whole attention. His face was solemn, and I sure didn’t like the tone of his voice. “John, I don’t know how to tell you this. There has never been anything like it. Somehow your DNA has been altered into something inhuman. I think it is a response to all the carbon you take in from the roasted coffee. It has altered the biological tissue in your nose to act as an elimination organ for carbon. Each time you exhale the carbon dioxide from your lungs is chemically condensed into diamonds.

This saddened me much, “Doctor, isn’t there some other way to fix this without me giving up coffee. I don’t think you know how much it means to me. It‘s all I got.”

At this the doctor became saddened. “John, the DNA change cannot be reversed. It is going to get worse until the only thing we can do is to cut off your nose.”

A faint smile of hope crept across my face. “You mean I don’t have to give up the coffee?”