Thunderclap New Man

I was raised on hot sauce from the time my grandfather shared his with me when I was just a barefoot boy. I can't even remember the brand he used, but the bottle label had the contradictory advice "to keep me hot, keep me cold!"

There began my life quest to douse almost everything I ate with the fiery red stuff, and along with it, my need to find more and more bottles with funnier and funnier brand names. It's hard to top "Smokin' Tonsils," but "Slap My Ass and Call Me Sally" brand hot sauce was amusing, as was the one pictured at right.

Truth be told, I'm happy with a bottle of good old Texas Pete.  I don't need the artisan hot stuff; I just need hot sauce.

But we all have our limits.  More than one drop of "Smokin' Tonsils" will make you feel like parts of your skull have been trepanned to let out some of the pressure. That's one I learned from experience.

We take you now to the Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, N.Y., where recently a 34-year old male presented for treatment. He was otherwise healthy, but complained of the worst headache of his life (and this was BEFORE he saw the bill, I wanna tell ya...)

Carolina Reapers

The physician on duty was Dr. Kulothungan Gunasekaran, who questioned the man and found that his patient had recently taken part in a hot pepper eating contest. On the bill of fare was the rare but prized Carolina Reaper pepper, and the patient had enthusiastically gobbled one of the Fayetteville Fireballs before coming down with what Dr.  Gunasekaran calls a "thunderclap" headache.



The patient said he was feeling better after some rest in the hospital, and went home, only to return feeling worse than ever after a bit, signing in at the ER and being given a brain scan called a CT angiogram which showed the problem: the blood vessels in his brain were narrowing.

Now then. You know that rubbing WD40 on your balky knee will not improve your flexibility, no matter what that guy in line at Target told you, but it is true that the same stuff - capsaicin, the heat-inducing chemical in peppers - that makes your pork chop so tasty is also in over-the-counter arthritis rubs with names like Capzasin-HP. It's nature's versatility on display, it is.

Todd Schwedt is  a professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, an expert on these kinds of headaches, and NOT the inventor of the Schweddy Balls cookies so popular at the holidays.

"Folks will describe this as if they felt like something exploded in their head or they got hit in the back of the head," Schwedt says. "So it's really how quickly it becomes very severe that makes it a thunderclap headache."

He adds that they can be caused by other things besides hot sauce, so I guess if you get the worst katzenjammer of the year and you have not been eating anything hotter than Wheaties, you might want to get the noggin checked out.