Sick Card

I finally called it quits on hoping this thing living in my chest would just magically get better and went to the Urgent Care on Sunday. It was serious enough to drag both the kids with me to a germ-infested urgent care and later ER for XRays.

My husband, of course, is traveling the world on a book tour.

Just kidding. Work travel. And you know what? I’ve never needed to call him back from a work trip, but this whole week is testing my limits of put-up-with-ness.

I saw a harried and very casual nurse practitioner at the Urgent Care. She was very confusing. She listened to my lungs, asked “And you’re not a smoker?” to which I assured her I was not and had never been. She closed up shop and said, “Well, your lungs sound clear so you should be good. Just use your inhaler for the breathlessness.”

My face must have shown my frustration and disbelief because she immediately said, “But you’ve already been seen twice, so we might as well just get an xray done.”

Gee. I’d hate to put you out.

My kids were being angels. Thank god for technology! I was bored out of my gourd because after handing the iPad and iPhone to each kid, I was out of entertainment for myself. I decided to just count the loogies.

By the time we sat through the ER rotation for radiology, got back to the room, finally got results, a total of about an hour and a half had gone by. Not too bad. The kids had their evil flip sides hidden behind the screens so I was counting blessings.

The NP came back in and told me “The radiologist did find an area with pneumonia, but it looks to be resolving itself. I personally think it was a soft diagnosis and you should wait before taking the ZPack. The antibiotics are aggressive and may cause upset stomach and diarrhea.”

Pardon me for thinking you’re absolutely full of shit, but the fact I’m spending 30 minutes every night coughing up a lung and again in the morning when i’m surrounded by offspring leads me to choose diarrhea over not being able to breath.

Dumbass.

And I was cool with all of this because there’s nothing better than proving you are not, in fact, paranoid crazy about feeling like you cannot breath without coughing. And coughing takes deep breaths to complete. Laundry doesn’t get done around here anyway, but this made lugging a stack of my 4 year old’s undies up the stairs completely impossible.

So I started the meds, I called my husband to let him know his wife is a trooper. He made zero attempt to call off any part of his trip. I was going to just carry this around like a bullshit card in my purse. The next time my husband wants to whine at me about feeling like he needs an entire day to lay in bed because his nose is running, I pull out the big fat PNEUMONIA take home paperwork and drop it at his feet, and turn and walk away.

But now it feels like I’m getting a cold on top of this other nonsense, and this is what will send me over the edge. If either of the children start sneezing or coughing, i’m moving us all to the nearest Holiday Inn and living on room service and laundry service until kingdom come.