There is a First for Everything. . .

. . .and mine is pneumonia. Yup – you heard me right – I have pneumonia!!!

Last night as I was getting ready for bed, I just could not stop coughing so I took my cough syrup, just like the night before but after an entire hour, no relief. I was so frustrated and scared – what if I couldn’t stop coughing? I would never be able to go to sleep, never be able to get up for work, and oh yeah – KEEP COUGHING!

I was so desperate, I called the on call doctor at my doctor’s office – what an asshole. I understand – it is not your life long dream to have some coughing broad call you up at home at 9pm on a week night but you are, in fact, actually ON CALL, hence, it is your job. I explained the situation as briefly as I could – said the cough syrup wasn’t working and asked if there I could either #1 – up the dose a little bit to see if that helped or #2 – take something else in conjunction with it to help. He just sat there – very condecending and said, of course not – you have to take all meds as directed and if it wasn’t working, there was nothing I could do.

I got off the phone and just sat on the couch and cried. I was tired, my body was weary, I just wanted to go to sleep and was so sick of being sick. I knew something wasn’t right but at 9pm, the only options were the ER and I wasn’t quite ready for that yet. So, I laid down in bed and finally dozed off around 11pm.

I got up this morning feel worse and decided then and there I had to get back in to see the doctor NOW. Unfortunately, I had left my work laptop at work, thinking I had to be getting better so I had to make the trip out to work to get it first. My doctor’s office opened at 8am and I called them at 8 on the dot. They couldn’t get me in until 11:40, which just wasn’t going to work. It is a 30 minute drive to my firm so I would have had to drive all the way and then back to my doctor’s office which is also another 30 minute drive from my house – a complete waste.

Luckily, the local Clinic offers an Immediate Care Clinic, right around the corner from my company – the same place Brian took me to when I had the flu in February. It costs me the exact same as a office visit – just a co-pay and my guess was that at 8am on a Weds morning, I might have a shot of getting right in.

I did – noone was there and within 30 minutes, I was back in a room with the ICC doctor. He was SO nice, so different than my regular doctor – not that my doctor isn’t nice, but I really don’t think he takes me seriously when I go in there anymore. I know I go to the doctor A LOT but I don’t go for every sniffle or hangnail – if I go in, something is wrong with me. I think my regular doctor gets frustrated because he can’t readily tell what is wrong with me and has a tendency to brush me off.

Not this guy – he was like a doting father and rushed me off to the Radiology Department to get a chest X-rays. Within the hour, I found out I had pneumonia.

I wanted to cry from relief – not because I want pneumonia but because I finally had SOMETHING, I knew it didn’t feel right, that this wasn’t a normal cold, that it was ridiculous that after 10 days, I still wasn’t feeling any better.

So, Father Doctor hooked me up with an inhaler, a steroid and a better antibodic than my family doc and ordered me home for the next week. He said that if I felt better – really better, then I could go to work on Monday if I wanted to. I felt so guilty and sad – I will have to use the week off I had planned to use for around Christmastime but what can you do? Not to mention, my boss’s last day was yesterday so I literally am the only one in my office now to do her work.

My new boss was wonderful – I E-mailed them all as soon as I got home and she insisted that I literally not work at all for the rest of the week, she didn’t want me doing anything. It took such a load off my shoulders to have permission to just sit for the next 3 days.

I felt worse as this afternoon wore on – my cough was back and even 4 hits off my new inhaler didn’t stop it. I took a whole dose of cough syrup with codeine and before I knew it – me, Cara L, was napping in the middle of the day! Another first for me.

I woke up at 4:45pm when my aunt called to check up on me and when I finally got my groggy ass up, I really did feel much better.

I can’t believe this has happened to me – I have never been this sick in my entire life. I feel like I am being too lazy but when I was faced with the option of being put in the hospital, if I get worse, then I guess it is pretty important to be lazy for a while.

So, I have a comfy couch, 3 brand new books to read and over 100 DVDs in my collection at my disposal for the next 4 days. I do have plans on Saturday I would like to keep if at all possible but I swear, I am not doing anything if I do not feel markedly better. I promise.