saya kacang yang merbahaya

this week we're studying about obstructive and restrictive disorders of the respiratory system. i don't really understand the difference between restrictive and obstructive, but i do know that both contribute to breathing difficulty.

back to the title, kacang yang merbahaya.

in obstructive disorders, there's a foreign body type obstruction. foreign body can be categorized into two: organic or inorganic (or the old one "vegetable and non-vegetable", why vegetable don't ask me). organic usually food, and inorganic usually something like coins, or pins or marbles, or razors, or whatever non-food thing that people sometimes shoved into their throat.

take a guess, which one is more dangerous, organic or inorganic?

since i can't hear your thought from in front of my pc, i'll just give my own guess. for me it's inorganic. yelaa, mana taknya, bayangkan kalau tercekik butang baju... tak ke haru jadinya.. but friends, that's where i'm wrong. the dangerousness of the category is not whether the foreign object is big or not, it's just which one is more frequent than the other. so, if you're talking about frequency, organic stuff proves to be more dangerous since we eat everyday, at least once a day. higher chances for food stuff to block our respiratory system. atau kata mudahnya, lebih senang tercekik tulang, dari tercekik butang. wahahaha. err..it's not funny, i know.

which food item that has highest frequency of blocking our airway?yeps, it's the nuts. and the sub species of it, peanuts, hazelnut, almond, kacang goreng, kacang botak, kacang dalam tin, kacang rebus etc etc. the biggest nut i've seen is only around 1.5 cm long (almond). not that big. and how big is a peanut minus the pod? around 0.3 cm maybe. or half a centimeter. small. this small peanut had once killed an A&E patient in the hospital near my campus. just because it got stuck in between the vocal cord. he died on his way to the x-ray room to be x-rayed. it's a very horrible death, i'm sure. dying of suffocation, cyanosis will occur, and you'll look blue. not helping that you can't talk and keep holding your neck trying to get the peanut out of your airway...

so, what's the moral of the story here?
the moral is (tanya sendiri, jawab sendiri, ini adalah sindrom syok sendiri), no matter how small a thing is, if it's placed in the right position, at the right time, it can change the world. small things, like throwing your trash at the correct place, don't spit in public area, washing your hands after using the toilet, don't bitch behind other's backs, be polite to everyone you meet, really do change your world. for example, washing hands after using toilet can prevent you from getting Hepatitis A, cholera, worm infection, and that gross feeling on your hands. not spitting in public can help preventing the spread of common cold, cough, TB, or whatever bacteria that you have in you. YOU can change the world by doing small, good deeds.
tak payah nak buat yang besar-besar. like creating a machine to stop ice in Antarctica from melting. just do simple things like, switching of the lights when you don't need it, stop open burning, recycle, etc etc.

at the end of the day, be careful while eating kacang goreng. remember, it can kill you.