I promise that's just massage oil...

As a massage therapist there are a couple of things that we deal with now and then that are unique to our field. People fart on us. When you relax during a massage, everything relaxes. We have to deal with skeezeballs who still think massage is code for hand job. We listen to relaxing Enya music all damn day which trust me is not relaxing after the 40th hour of handbells and oriental wind instruments. Some massage clients have skin tags. Lots and lots of skin tags. You never know how close a back pimple is to popping if you don't know it's there in the first place. We stand on our feet all day bending and leaning and wearing on our bodies and we can't take sick days when we're just a little under the weather because we lose our income source. No clients. No money.

So unless a therapist is contagious we usually try and power through a cough or cold like a champ to keep the income flow. These are not fun days. When you go to work kinda sick or kinda hungover think of how awful it feels sitting at your desk blowing your nose and coughing. Now imagine being up and moving all the time changing the center of gravity of your congested head constantly while trying to create a relaxing and tranquil space for clients as snot and mucus build up in every oraface of your face and your esophagus slowly turns to sand paper. This is a cold for a therapist.

My cold started with a stuffy nose, until I started working on clients and leaning my head forward...then suddenly without warning it turned to a gushing runny nose. Turns out my shirt sleeve is as absorbent as a sham-wow. A runny nose in the treatment room is pretty easy to deal with though. You get a towel, keep it on your shoulder and bam, problem solved. The worst thing is having to cough during a massage. A cough is the most abrupt noise your body can make and certainly not conducive to relaxing or falling asleep especially with how abrupt it is. So now, I'm stuck in a treatment room with a naked man, Enya, a snotty wet sleeve and towel and an unyielding need to cough.

If you've ever tried to suppress a cough you'll know what this feels like. (I don't know why you'd EVER suppress a cough in the first place but I digress.). Every pore on your body starts to sweat. Your lips purse together and your throat clamps up. That tickle in the back of your throat becomes unbearable. As you try and breathe through your nose both of them stop up entirely forcing you to take in air through your already parched esophagus. Each breath a pull of the trigger in the Russian roulette of cough. You struggle to take in the minimum amount of air necessary to maintain basic functions and keep the flow of the massage going without letting on to the fact that you're in the most uncomfortable position you've ever been in internally. Doing your best to keep the client unaware of the awfulness brewing inside you.

You start to think, maybe I can just get some sort of baby cough out and that would help...yeah I can totally do a "controlled cough" and it won't be too loud. I'll just turn into my arm and it won't even register. You realize that would never happen as your body makes a gagging motion and you feel like liquid might burst from every opening in your face. Even as you think the need to cough has passed you realize that it hasn't and it won't until you do it. You look at the clock to see if you can make it the remainder of the time.

You've still got 30 minutes left.

What felt like 45 minutes was actually 5 and you're almost no closer to finishing. A couple of throat convulsions eek out of you which sound somewhere between a hiccup/cough/sneeze but they're quiet enough you can convince yourself the client didn't hear and thought the vibration was just part of the massage. Finally after finishing up one area of the body you decide you can't take it and excuse yourself to "take care of this tickle in my throat without disturbing you" and you leave the treatment room to cough once and blow your nose. All of that and it takes one cough.

I encourage you to try and stifle a cough for as long as you can just to see what this feels like because you can't imagine the horror without experiencing it yourself. Then imagine trying to hide the fact that you're supressing a cough while performing both a powerful and graceful motor skill.

Massage therapists have some interesting work hazards. Did I mention we get farted on. A lot.