Ok not really, but I could have died. This morning I left for work in Pixie the Prius and as I pulled into traffic I had a sneezing fit. And by sneezing fit I mean I sneezed something like 10 times in a row. This only took about a minute, but you know in a minute much damage can be done.
Here's what I learned about sneezing and driving.
Have you noticed how when you sneeze your eyes shut tightly? Someone told me that it's because the air is forced out of your lungs so hard (200 miles an hour, I hear), that if you don't shut your eyes tightly, they will pop right out of your head and simply dangle off your face by the optic nerve. I have no idea how true this is, but the image stuck with me and every time I sneeze I have this vision. I also wonder whether I would still be able to see, except it would be all weird and I'd see my feet or my lap (depending on whether I was sitting or standing) and whether my 3D vision would be all shot to hell and I would just get two separate images. I mean at some point the 3D vision would no longer work, especially if one eye went all googly and started swivelling in a different direction. Right?
The other thing about sneezing is that your body (or is just me?) kind of convulses, like a giant involuntary spasm of every muscle in my body. When I sneeze once or twice it's not a big deal, but anyone who's had a sneezing fit will tell you how exhausting it is. It might be more accurate to say that I will tell you how exhausted I am after a sneezing fit.
What seems to happen when I keep sneezing is that the giant spasms build on each other. My body hasn't quite recovered from the first sneeze, when the second hits, then the third, and so on. So the spasms become more intense and uncontrolled.
What I further discovered this morning is that if I'm having a sneezing fit while I'm driving, strange things happen like I start to smack my forehead against the wheel, sudden acceleration, and random turns of the wheel, directly into traffic, of course. It did occur to me to pull over, but as I said this all took less than a minute, and by the time I had the thought to do that it was over.
Point is, I could have died. I didn't, but I could have.