Ah.
Nothing like the sound of a pneumatic cough in the morning.
I’ve got pneumonia. Remember last Friday when I had to go home in the middle of the day to get my inhaler? That was the beginnings of it, apparently. Sunday night, I began to have the restless coughs and wheezes and couldn’t fall asleep, so I took some codeine. I woke up coughing so hard, tasting codeine, so I got up and read the newspaper and ate an ice cream sandwich (when in doubt, eat ice cream!). Then I attempted to sleep but every time I’d almost get to sleep, my breathing would go into that heavy deep sleep breathing and I would be awakened by the Whooo ahhh whhhheeeee of the crap in my lungs, singing like they were trying out as backups for the Whitney Houston/Mariah Carey Skank Ho Screechfest 2002. I called in sick at 2:30 A.M. Then I took some Ny-Quil and tried to go back to sleep. I managed to fall asleep just as it was getting light outside and the birds were chirping.
Then I spent all day yesterday in a delirious fog. I slept until 10:30, got up, called and made a doctor’s appointment, chatted with Chauffi a tiny bit, then went back to bed until it was time to go to the doctor. I was a bit apprehensive about driving out to my clinic, which is 20 miles away, and rightfully so. Everything had a surreal dreamlike quality.
And then, of course, they had to weigh me. Had I been able to get enough air into my lungs to curse at the nurse, I would have had some rather choice words to say to her, but I didn’t. I didn’t even bother taking off my shoes or taking my keys out of my pockets. And I had gained a pound. I tried using sign language to tell her that it might just be the forty-two pounds of phlegm and other crap in my lungs, or the fact that I’m cramped up like four kids in the backseat of a Volkswagen Beetle on a cross-country road trip, but I just thought to myself ‘Eh fuck it.’ Still, the gained pound is pissing me off. GD fudge.
So my doctor decided that I probably had walking pneumonia, but she wanted to take some chest x-rays to make sure. So they bring me into the x-ray thingy and the technician screws around for what was possibly eight hours trying to find some old x-rays I’d had done three years ago. She never found them. I stood in front of the x-ray machine and bent over it, resting my head on the pillow while she screwed around, my gown falling open to the ground. I didn’t care. ‘Eh Fuck it’ is a wonderful mantra when ill.
She took the first x-ray. It didn’t turn out so well, so she took another one. This time, she made me squash my breasts outward to get a clearer reading. I had a whole mammogram flashback. I was going to punch her if she made me do that one again, but she didn’t. Then we did the side view and then a second one of the side view because the first one didn’t take either. That one, she couldn’t blame on my buxom fun pillows because they weren’t even involved.
Finally, diagnosis: walking pneumonia. I asked what the difference was between ‘walking pneumonia’ and regular pneumonia, but she couldn’t tell me. I think I have ‘knocked off my ass pneumonia’ myself. I didn’t tell the doctor that, though. Because the whole ‘fuck it’ mantra precludes witty sarcasms.
The fall out from this: I’m shivering, hoarking, and generally cantankerous. I have three different pills to take and three days off of work, minimum. And I didn’t update my diary yesterday. And truthfully, today’s update isn’t all that great either, but I didn’t want anyone thinking that I had died or anything. No. Just felt like it.
The upside: I just added ‘hoarking’ to my spell checker. It wanted to change it to hoarding or ‘hoar king’.
Eh. Fuck it.
