Death by Lozenge

Do you ever get that feeling that only really cringey things happen to you? You know in the Guardian's Weekend magazine there is a questionnaire for various people, usually people who are lovies, asking them things like 'When were you most happy?', 'What are your worst traits?' .. that sort of thing? Well you know the question where the mag asks them what their most embarrassing moment is, is it just me or, apart from Fergie from Black Eyed Peas who peed herself onstage, are most of their answers pretty tame?.. Some even saying they never have been embarrassed, or have been turned slightly scarlet forgetting their lines in a theatre dress rehearsal. This is NOTHING.
I have had LOADS of embarrassing moments in my life, and what happened to me today will DEFINITELY be in the top 5.
(And by the way- I'll tell you all about Iceland trip shortly...)
I've just started working for the NHS and have just been on an intensive 3-day induction course. I've also recently developed a hacking, chesty cough which doesn't seem to want to go away .. I don't think going to a country which was -3 degrees during the day helped but anyway... So on Monday in our first "lecture", and bear in mind there are about 40 of us all crammed into this room, most of which are nurses, midwives, radiographers etc, not just us admin staff, I got a big coughing fit that went on for some time and was annoying and embarrassing, to the point where the man teaching us about infection control (coincidentally) stopped his talk to pass me a cough lozenge. But this is just the start- get this: I then, "cleverly" I thought, purchased some cough lozenges of my own for the next couple of days, knowing it was likely to occur again. This was all very well, the lozenges did their job, but today, feeling a little more relaxed, when I started my morning spluttering, I popped in a Locket. Only thing was the big fat smooth slidey thing suddenly became wedged in my throat so that I was almost convulsing on the spot like some sort of deranged woman, gargling and making weird wheezing noises. I must have gone bright purple and the sounds were similar something out of 'Gremlins'. And considering I was in a hospital, surrounded by medical staff, it was only the IT girl who came and gave me a huge slap on the back and managed to dislodge it. Oh how the shame. And thankfully, my humourous quips about it afterwards slightly diverted people somewhat from the dick I had made of myself. And oh how I breezed through my presentation that afternoon as nothing was ever going to beat the morning's spectacle in terms of humiliation.
And maybe, just maybe, it was my body's way of reacting to the shock of going back to work... scary stuff this work. It nearly killed me.

Soundtrack: Kaiser Chiefs- Oh My God