August 8, 2008

I'll be dead soon.

I have a sinus infection. According to Dr. Samuel Flikier-Franjo, the otolaryncologist I saw at Cima Hospital, a nasty one too. He stuck a metal wand, with a camera on it, up my nose and we watched it in full color on a ten inch screen. Spelunking in my head. Cool. He pointed to the gobs of white pus hanging in the glossy pink cavern and told me that I wouldn't need an MRI because it was pretty clear what was going on. I guess my telling him about the raging fevers, the three weeks of headaches that required Vicodin just to function and the domino-sized blob of green, brown and pink I'd horked up two days earlier weren't enough to assure him. I was given a scrip for some monster anti-biotic and sent on my way. I'm very anti-anti-biotics. Haven't taken one in, like, seven years. I'm convinced that if I take anti-biotics in the willy-nilly way everyone I know seems to, that one day, I'll come down with some Ebola-Marburg-Hanta-Avian killer flu and no medicine known to man will stop it and I'll die a slow and messy death leaving my darling husband to be cared for by our six-year-old because she's the only one who knows our phone number and address. My neighbor, whose husband has terrible sinus problems, suggested I see someone when I was on day four of what I'd first thought was a migraine headache. I don't like doctors and since I wasn't feeling congested at the time, I didn't want to find out that the skull-splitting pain I was having was, in fact, some inoperable brain tumor and I only had a month to live. Granted, finding out that it was terminal would at least give me a month to write down information that my husband might need and make some of those depressing videos for my kid that you always see the tragic characters in movies making. As it turns out, not only am I not dying, I should be just dandy in a few days. My head will stop hurting, the dizziness will go away, the pain in my face will fade, no more chunks of ick, the sexy growl in my voice will leave with the sore throat and I'll be fresh as a daisy again. Unless I drop dead suddenly from one of the side-effects of the anti-biotic. I looked it up this morning on the Internet. Seizures, heart attack, liver failure. I felt woozy and went back to bed. After a while I convinced myself that I really didn't feel my liver twitching and I probably wasn't having chest pain and I should just get up and carry on as best I could. After all, I thought, I wouldn't want anyone to think I was being melodramatic.