I’ve been sick since Christmas day.
I had a cold and I was trying to be really cool and not a whiny-ass about it. I felt okay in the mornings but like a blob of goo by noon every day.
We had a lot of Mondays and Fridays off work for holidays but I kept taking advil and cough meds and going in on the days I had to until I felt lousy and ended up driving home in a fever haze each day.
Yesterday I woke at 3:30 am with stabby pains around my right lung. I couldn’t take a breath without horrible pains. I’ve had this happen fleetingly over the years and figured it was just a muscle spasm but this wouldn’t let up.
As I lay there taking really short breaths, I debated about whether or not to wake husband who was snoring contentedly and had maybe been asleep for 3 hours at best.
Then I realized I had to pee. So I got up and took care of that and tried coughing which surprisingly didn’t hurt nearly as much as breathing. I did this a couple times and was soon able to take almost normal breaths but I made the mistake of yawning at one point and thought I was dying.
I called the nurse# on the back of my insurance card and told her I’d been having coughing fits and how long I’d been sick and how I’d been running a fever but usually under 101º and how I had an alien in my chest trying to get using a machete.
She said I could go to the ER because I could have pneumonia and possibly a partially collapse lung…or maybe a broken rib.
I didn’t go…not right away because I realized that I was the only person scheduled to work Monday because every other person was going to New Orleans for the BCS Championship game. I actually went in to work (taking short breaths and feeling dizzy) and survived until about noon when I drove my dumb ass to Urgent care.
They took chest xrays and the good news is that I just have acute bronchitis (“but we’ll send your films to your primary care physician to be sure there is no sign of pneumonia”) and the pains in my chest are most likely pleurisy so they gave me antibiotics and steroids. Of course i haven’t called to see if the blood test showed the cause as viral or bacterial so I’m just gonna take these pills and hope they work.
In the mean time, I’m going to lay here in bed for a whole day and not wait on anyone or do any work via email or otherwise
I’m gonna finally play my new game - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword all damn day!
