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Hot Pink

Posted 5 years, 10 months ago., on Saturday, February 22nd, 2003, at 6:49 pm

So the antibiotics that they’ve given me this time are hot pink. And about the size of my head.

I’ve been dealing with this little thing in my lungs for a few months now, something which has settled there and has been aggravating my asthma — kind of like our current President. But in the past couple of weeks it’s been getting worse, and while my peak flow rates have been fine and my air flow has been good, I’ve been coughing a lot and feeling very short of breath. So I got my manager to let me leave the mollusc training site early yesterday so that I could get home in time for a 6:30 appointment with my doctor.

Unfortunately, Bay Area traffic defeated my attempts to get to the doctor on time, and I wound up being too late at the Urgent Care Clininc, so they gave my appointment time to someone else. Fortunately, I was able to reschedule for this morning. And this morning at the doctor I found out two things of interest:

“Whooping cough!??!” my mother said to me on the phone. “How can you have whooping cough?”

I told her that it was all the rage up in Yolo County. All the kids have it, and so do a few adults. It’s very Continental and sophisticated. We know all this because whooping cough is one of those diseases that, if you get it, needs to be reported to the Health Department, and the doctor who is in charge of the Urgent Care Clinic has pretty much become the de facto expert on Whooping Cough in Yolo County.

So now I’m taking massive steroids (more than I’ve taken since high school), some huge hot pink antibiotics (think Divine in prescription form), some lovely codeine-laced cough syrup, and a special inhaler. All of this in addition to my regular diet of pills, potions, and nostrums. I’m tied to my nebulizer with bonds of mist, and my albuterol lives in my pocket (well, it always does, but I like the opportunity for dramatic flair).

The good news, though, is that if this is whooping cough (the test have yet to come back positive, but the doctor thinks it’s a good bet), then I’m probably well past the contagious stage. This is good, since I’ve spent that past week or two working with mollusks in California, whose immune systems are not necessarily up to snuff.

On another note, I’ll be back on the road tomorrow, after less than 48 hours at home. But, at least, I’ll be in a cool hotel with free wireless network access, which is close to Yosemite.

So, until later… Whoop! Whoop! Gasp!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 22nd, 2003 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Lungs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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