In the office where my mild mannered alter ego works, there is a most unusual woman. She's a nurse, a veteran of emergency rooms and trauma units. In her declining years, she has taken a job managing a whole crew of other nurses. Together they have something like two hundred years of nursing experience. They've seen it all; decomposition, lacerated spleens, tooth picks in eyeballs. Yet for all her years of experience and the rough crew she manages, our hero, we'll call her Helen, can be laid low by one word: Mucus. It makes no sense at all. She describes working on hospital wards where patients needed their tracheotomies cleaned. Her aversion to snot is so great that, rather clean the trachs, she would trade with one of the other nurses who had bed pans to clean. Yech! In honor of Helen, let's take a look at mucus and the fun it can be in writing.
First of all, what is mucus? Mucus is a thick, viscous liquid produced in the sinus cavities and bronchial tubes that serves to moisten the exposed tissues where it is produced and to protect them from germs, dust, bugs, etcetera. It is made out of water, fat (in the form of oils) and a whole host of different antibiotics and whatnots designed to keep your nose germ free. It is also slightly saline. It is produced by thousands of small glands similar to the sebaceous glands in your skin, only these produce snot.
Let's look at its two primary functions in more detail:
First of all it serves to moisten. This seems simple but is terribly important. Most of your body that is exposed to air, namely your skin, has between the outside world and itself a layer of dead skin cells. This is important because human tissue is naturally porous and would leak if not protected. In the case of nasal and bronchial passages, the body doesn't have the luxury of a thick layer of dead cells. The living tissue in your respiratory tract has to be able to react with the air. This is for the sake of smell in the nose and for respiration in the lungs. A steady flow of moisture in the form of snot is oozed out to coat the walls and ensure everything goes smoothly. If a character in your horror story were suddenly to stop producing snot, say as the result of chemical exposure, they would quickly develop painful sinus' headaches and bloody noses. If the same thing happened in the bronchial tubes, the victim would start coughing up blood and would be at risk of suffocation as their alveoli (the little guys that actually do the oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange) began to tear and fill with blood. This causes a choking smothering feeling as if you have a heavy weight on your chest.
The other purpose of snot, that of general cleaning agent, is also terribly important. The world, in case you hadn't noticed, is basically a dirty place and all of that filth, one way or another, makes it into the air we breathe. Pollen, dust, soot from where you burned your latest victim, it's all there. This can be particularly hard on the exposed cells of the nose and lungs. As I mentioned earlier, mucus has antimicrobial capabilities of its own. It also has an important power, that of the flush. Try this, grab a nose hair and give a tug. Youch! Immediately your nose starts to run. Mine's running just typing about it. Whatever the insult, the noses response is to produce snot. It's terribly effective. If your seven year old has stuffed a jelly bean up her nose, leave it alone and eventually snot will dissolve it enough for her to sneeze it out. If, on the other hand, a virus has infected the lining of her bronchial passages, a constant outpouring of mucus will flush out newly replicated copies of the virus slowing, maybe even stopping the infection. Of course, the nasty yellow/green stuff she's going to cough up along the way, well yuck.
In horror writing the best use of snot that I have ever seen was clearly Steven King's "The Stand," A book who's first three hundred pages were solid gold and its last three hundred pure shit. Sorry Steven. Just my opinion. In the first three hundred a plague breaks out and kills more than ninety-nine percent of the population. It is awesome. One of the things the disease does is attack the bronchial tubes, sinues etc. Steven gets into some great gory detail about gobs of snot sliding out of noses onto shirts and the like. It's great fun.
It's interesting to note that the nose and lungs aren't the only parts of the body that produces snot. That clear stringy lining to your stomach that comes up when you barf really hard is really just snot. Your intestines also produce some stuff that's basically mucus to help lubricate your food as it passes along. Having stools with mucus in them is a sign of serious illness. I've never seen it. Don't need to. It would sure put Helen into a tizzy though so it can't be all bad.
There's one other part of the body that produces a product that is basically snot and its different for men and women. If, um, a guy and a girl like each other and they, uhh, get excited, both of them produce a kind of snot. Hers is a lubricant and his makes up the majority of his...uh well I'll let you come to your own conclusion.
And you thought gore and porn were two different genera.
Now get out there and write.
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