A bucket of weird #1. The bronchitis.
"A bucket of weird" is beginning to describe this week so far.
Part 1, in which I find I have bronchitis and am still off work for the week
Monday, I started feeling worse, rather than better. I think I improved during the days and then at nights it got worse again. Eternally-hopeful, eternally-not-want-to-hassle-doctor-for-a-mere-chest-cold just kept taking his evening NyQuil 2-3 times, and daytime non-drowsy cold stuff, and figured "ok, tomorrow will be finer." Carolyn finally started telling me Monday that a doctor is really a good idea. I finally called mine on Tuesday, only to find he's closed on Tuesdays and Thursdays (I tend to get sick a lot on, well, holiday weekends like this past ones, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays -- I *never* get to my doc the day I want to). I called his "urgent" # and he called back and told me that I could go to Urgent Care, and that the need for his approval from my HMO was no longer there.
It took me from then (11am maybe?) until 4pm to get my ass off the couch and out the door -- just too much the zombie. 30 minutes in the waiting room (and, annoyingly, no one else came in after me; had I been psychic and left home a half hour later, I could have gotten in just as soon), 5 minutes with the nurse (I'm impressed that, at least for respiratory stuff, a Pulse oximeter is now a standard part of the drill (blood O2 level down to 96% -- nothing horrible but it's enough to show my lungs are not pulling in the oxygen as they should. I think that's why when I get a chest cold, I feel so drugged even when not on drugs. Lack of oxygen doesn't make you breathe more either, it's build-up of CO2, so your body doesn't tend to compensate -- I think I have that right). So anyway, vitals (all others fine), ... take off my T-shirt and put on the open-back gown ... and then sit and wait another 1/2 hour for the doctor.
A diagnosis of bronchitis, a breathing treatment, and an impressive array of prescriptions later (5-day powerful antibiotic, cough syrup with codeine, Albuterol inhaler, prednisone with a compil-cated dosage schedule for 9 days), a trip to the local CVS, and Tuesday night was not too bad. The codeine works quicker than the NyQuil and about as effectively (i.e. I had to take a second dose around 3am, but fell back asleep in about 5 minutes rather than 30-45), and I don't stay groggy half the day from it. Last night was even better, and today I feel on my way out of it -- we'll see how tonight goes.
I think because I made noises about being in on Monday and then wasn't, and one other co-worker is on vacation, I'm getting snarky vibes in e-mails from two co-workers -- oh yeah, and I'm supposed to be on-call. Hard to commit to getting paged in the middle of the night on a week of insufficient sleep and after taking powerful drowsy-making cough syrups that I would be able to do things up to and including driving into work and doing things requiring full privileges on production systems, so they had to cover for me. Oh, and previously-mentioned problem people seem to be doing their best to cut me out of the loop on a project I've been working on. Oh well, I've got a ton I can be doing on other things (in fact, I have been working on some software for work -- I have not dared touch anything mission-critical but I think I have written a much-improved disk-space-monitoring program than what we were using which was pretty inflexible in some important ways. Besides, my bash scripting needed practice).
Part 1, in which I find I have bronchitis and am still off work for the week
Monday, I started feeling worse, rather than better. I think I improved during the days and then at nights it got worse again. Eternally-hopeful, eternally-not-want-to-hassle-doctor-for-a-mere-chest-cold just kept taking his evening NyQuil 2-3 times, and daytime non-drowsy cold stuff, and figured "ok, tomorrow will be finer." Carolyn finally started telling me Monday that a doctor is really a good idea. I finally called mine on Tuesday, only to find he's closed on Tuesdays and Thursdays (I tend to get sick a lot on, well, holiday weekends like this past ones, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays -- I *never* get to my doc the day I want to). I called his "urgent" # and he called back and told me that I could go to Urgent Care, and that the need for his approval from my HMO was no longer there.
It took me from then (11am maybe?) until 4pm to get my ass off the couch and out the door -- just too much the zombie. 30 minutes in the waiting room (and, annoyingly, no one else came in after me; had I been psychic and left home a half hour later, I could have gotten in just as soon), 5 minutes with the nurse (I'm impressed that, at least for respiratory stuff, a Pulse oximeter is now a standard part of the drill (blood O2 level down to 96% -- nothing horrible but it's enough to show my lungs are not pulling in the oxygen as they should. I think that's why when I get a chest cold, I feel so drugged even when not on drugs. Lack of oxygen doesn't make you breathe more either, it's build-up of CO2, so your body doesn't tend to compensate -- I think I have that right). So anyway, vitals (all others fine), ... take off my T-shirt and put on the open-back gown ... and then sit and wait another 1/2 hour for the doctor.
A diagnosis of bronchitis, a breathing treatment, and an impressive array of prescriptions later (5-day powerful antibiotic, cough syrup with codeine, Albuterol inhaler, prednisone with a compil-cated dosage schedule for 9 days), a trip to the local CVS, and Tuesday night was not too bad. The codeine works quicker than the NyQuil and about as effectively (i.e. I had to take a second dose around 3am, but fell back asleep in about 5 minutes rather than 30-45), and I don't stay groggy half the day from it. Last night was even better, and today I feel on my way out of it -- we'll see how tonight goes.
I think because I made noises about being in on Monday and then wasn't, and one other co-worker is on vacation, I'm getting snarky vibes in e-mails from two co-workers -- oh yeah, and I'm supposed to be on-call. Hard to commit to getting paged in the middle of the night on a week of insufficient sleep and after taking powerful drowsy-making cough syrups that I would be able to do things up to and including driving into work and doing things requiring full privileges on production systems, so they had to cover for me. Oh, and previously-mentioned problem people seem to be doing their best to cut me out of the loop on a project I've been working on. Oh well, I've got a ton I can be doing on other things (in fact, I have been working on some software for work -- I have not dared touch anything mission-critical but I think I have written a much-improved disk-space-monitoring program than what we were using which was pretty inflexible in some important ways. Besides, my bash scripting needed practice).