Unbagging the Cats 1

Unbagging the Cats 1

Friday, October 28, 2011

The Mighty Convenient Care Clinic

I have been under the weather for a few days. Twelve days, to be precise. It's something I can't shake. If my illness was a one-sentence pitch, it would be "Sinus infection meets common cold."

The whole thing started a week ago Monday. I woke up with a pounding headache above both eyes. Which continued for three days. And I noticed the oddest thing. No matter where I was, there was a bad smell. I even asked The Pony in various venues, "What IS that? Do you smell it?" But he didn't. I have since come to the conclusion that I was smelling my own sinuses. Kind of creepy, huh?

Those three days of head-throbbing were followed by four days of throat-clearing, eye-watering, and night-choking. After which a new festival of nostril-clogging and chest congestion set up its brightly-colored tent on the prime footage of my person. So I did what any dedicated educator would do, and toiled from dawn 'til after dusk at conferences Tuesday and Thursday, and chose today, a day off, to seek professional intervention.

I did not even try to find a signal in the school building for my phone through the week, to call the doctor and set up an appointment. Pshaw! Doctors don't want to see you unless you have a standing six-month appointment. So I showed up on the doorstep of my town's newest medical facility, the Convenient Care Clinic. Which was OH SO CONVENIENT! Not only did I park right in front, instead of in a large hospital lot where a trolley-driver stalks you the minute you put your PRNDL in the park position, after traveling a distance of only five miles instead of twenty, but I was THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WAITING ROOM! Granted, I was examined by a nurse practitioner and not a doctor. But does something so routine really require eighty-leven years of medical school and a Denver mint of debt? I think not.

You know what happened, right? While in the exam room, I coughed nary a drop of phlegm. My nose did not drip or stuff up. My head did not hurt. I had no fever. And though I complained of wheezing, not a crackle was auditory. Huh. I, a perfectly healthy woman, had taken a day off to go sit in an exam room and be pronounce fit as a fiddle. I felt like the cartoon dude who found that singing frog: "Hello, my honey! Hello, my baby! Hello, my ragtime dolllllll!"

Still. The kind, gray-braided nurse practitioner gave me a prescription for an antibiotic and some cough medicine pills. That's right. She said that since it had lingered so long, and kept switching back to my sinuses, I probably needed the antibiotic to fight of that yellow snot. Which was green twelve days ago.

I forgot to take the first antibiotic pill when I picked it up. So I will take it tonight. It's supposed to be ingested twice a day, twelve hours apart. Hopefully, this is one that I do not have an unknown allergy to. The cough medicine pills might be interesting. I'm guessing they're something like benedryl, since the name starts with bene-. Anything that keeps the headache away is worth the squandering of ME-time in that office.

It only took thirty minutes. Which makes it Mighty Convenient Care to me.

2 comments:

Linda O'Connell said...

Always the way. Cough your head off allt he way to the Med Stop, walk in, and it stops. I think they have cough suppresant in the air. Hoep you feel better soon.

Val said...

Linda,
Yeah. It's kind of like when you rush your boobs to the mammogram clinic, and realize once you walk in that you're on the Bookmobile.