It's a Cold (all sarcasm intended)

So remember a long time ago in my blog I said that I was not sick, it turns out that I am... and have been for over a month. After more that a month of deep debilitating coughing, I went to see a doctor today. But wait, you need the back story (or technically, you don't need it as much as I want to tell it. Warning--icky cold stuff discussed below.)

So a couple days before Halloween, I got a horrible--really mean sore throat. I took some vitamin C and thought, oh, oh. Then the sinuses mildly kicked in and the coughing started. Not horrible coughing, but just enough to say, hum, I might be sick. This was over a weekend. So I took it easy that weekend. Did my little foray into illness get better with my increased care? NO. It got worse, especially the coughing. So being a good citizen and being terrified of labeled a swine flu infector, I took time off work the following week. But as I told you in my earlier blog, no headache, no fever, no aches, no pains--just a really bad cough every once in a while. So I went back to work and said to the world, I am not sick.

Cough persisted and persisted--one week, then two weeks, then three weeks. I had just started to notice that maybe, just maybe it wasn't as bad as it had been, when just before Thanksgiving, I became horribly stuffed up and started sneezing uncontrollably. Oh, oh. Now the coughing gained new, more diabolical depths right down to my toes. A few discrete coughs will be forgiven, but these mind numbing coughs upset all those in a three mile radius. I must be dying.

So yesterday, coughing caused me to leave the room and lose my lunch. It was more than a month and a week since this cough started and there seemed no end in sight. I went back to my meeting and later I was talking with a gal who commented on my cough--have I gone to see a doctor. "No, they'll just tell me my nose is dripping." "Well," says she, "I don't want to freak you out, but when I was younger, I had a bad cough and I insisted that they do an x-ray and they found lung cancer." WHOA. Now I am officially freaked out.

I called the doctor to set up an appointment right away. The next appointment for my regular doctor would be next Wednesday. I'm really hoping this will all be a bad memory by next Wednesday--do they have anything sooner. Well I can call in a 7 a.m. on Monday for a same day appointment, because my doctor only comes in on Monday, Tuesday mornings and Wednesday afternoon. OK, do you have any other doctors--yes, I can have an appointment at 7:45 in the morning. Great, sign me up. Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough (you get the idea).

Meanwhile, I go about my life, because I'm not sick. Everyone in my path is amazed that I'm not home in bed with that terrible cough. If I stayed home in bed with the cough, I'd have been home in bed for the past five weeks. Anyhoo, I practically stay awake all night to make sure that I get up early to get to the doctors this morning at 7:45. I'm even five minutes early. That's really something, because I am late for everything--very unusual for me to be early, but did I mention that Joan put it in my mind that I might have lung cancer!!

The first thing they do is to collect the co-pay that has gone up to $25. This is December. The rates are going to (no doubt) go up in January. Wasn't it just yesterday that the co-pay was $5 just so that people wouldn't abuse the benefit? But I digress. I was weighed (thanks for that depressing act) and they took my blood pressure (just fine) and they looked in my ear, my nose, my throat, took my pulse, listened to my breathing and my heart. I waxed on poetic about my symptoms and the doctor said, well it is viral, but I'll prescribe antibiotics. I said, no, if it is not bacterial, I don't want antibiotics that won't really do anything--I'm against that. Ok, says the doctor, you are right, the antibiotics won't really do anything, because you have a cold. Wait, I say, I have no fever, no headache, no symptoms other than stuffed up nose and horrible, horrible cough. That's right says the doctor, you have a cold. For a month??? I say exasperated (as though the doctor is personally responsible for the lack of vegetibles and nutrition that is my life). Yes, says the doctor, you have a cold.

I have a cold. Not lung cancer, not walking pnemonia, not swine flu, not anything fun or exotic, I have a cold. And apparently it gets to stay forever. The doctor is not rushing to publish an article on my five week ordeal that shows no signs of abating. He simply smiled (inwardly laughing at my extreme outrage) and said You have a Cold.

P.S. I just got a phone call from a friend who said that his wife (a doctor, ironically) had that terrible cough (he heard me coughing over the phone even with my hand over the mouth piece) for four months. OMG.