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.