I AM going to whine

I wasn't going to. I was going to suck it up, put on my big girl panties, and be a man.

I guess all of those things do not go together as well as one might hope.

Regardless, after the negative rapid strep test a week and a half ago my throat/sinus area have been on an every-other-day pattern. One day I felt pretty good and thought I'd shaken whatever it was. The next, I so totally knew I hadn't.

Sunday morning at 4:30 am things got more ugly than they've been in a long time. I woke up coughing (a lot), threw up, had a fever, and felt awful. I think I sucked it up fairly well by not getting out of bed, moving only so far as to roll over and back (which was taxing!), and taking a bath.*

The bath did not make things better, now I had all the aches and pains AND wet hair. My skin hurts, my hair hurts, EVERYthing hurts.

Long story short (and I've lost my attention span), I went to the urgent care clinic this afternoon. The choices of what is wrong with me were:


1. a viral issue


2. the flu. Not the flu but THE FLU


3. something bacterial



If it was number 1, I was on my own. Number 2 can be helped by some pills that will take about 1 day off of the normal 7 day span. Number 3 means antibiotics (!!!!!).

The best test? Shoving this thing up my nose into my sinus cavity to get a sample and test the sample for the flu. Well, that's what the doctor said. What it felt like was having my frontal lobe pulled out of my nostril by a Qtip with a scrubby end.


10 minutes later he came back and informed me I have the flu. Hopefully we got it in the first 48 hours so the pills can actually help. He gave me a note for missing class (which I don't think I can do anyway) a couple of prescriptions, and a kind look.

I kept asking him if he could make my hair stop hurting or make the sweating go away. He kept saying "no". I told him I was up for getting an epidural between C1 and C2 so I would ONLY feel my hair but he said something about how flopping around wouldn't help me get better from the flu. I think he doesn't know. He said the guy would come give me my epidural in 15 minutes. But the test was only 10 minutes so I guess I missed him. I should have double checked the home visit policy for the anesthesiologists at the hospital before leaving.


***Things in my family can always be fixed by taking a bath. Mom broke her arm when she was a kid and Grandma's answer was "take a bath, you'll feel better". (she did get it fixed later that day) Mom would say it to us and then tell the story about how that was Grandma's answer to things. Nevertheless, I take a bath to see if I'll feel better, to this day.