Now coming to the end of week number four of Squirrel's Magic Illness. I went to the doctor today, but since they told
me that the wait would be "about an hour and a half" and since I know from previous experience that I can safely double
that number and be closer, I decided I'd maybe try again tomorrow morning.
Or hey, maybe tomorrow morning I'll be feeling so much better I won't need a doctor, right? Right?
I've lost my voice, so I shouldn't keep talking. Instead, I'll leave you with the words of the Buddha:
Life's easy to live
for someone unscrupulous,
cunning as a crow,
corrupt, back-biting,
forward, & brash;
But for someone who's constantly
scrupulous, cautious,
observant, sincere,
pure in his livelihood,
clean in his pursuits,
it's hard.
The Dhammapada, XVIII. *shrug*, it made me feel better about
myself...
My stupid cough is still with me. What's worse, it's changing. Using my excellent problem-solving skills (hindered,
admittedly, by my lack of knowledge), I've concluded that what I have looks a lot
like Whooping Cough. Crap.
I knew I should have made that creepy doctor guy do a bacterial culture. I now have an actual whooping cough, so I'm
past the phase where a more specific anti-biotic would be effective. I know I should go see a doctor and get this little
suspicion confirmed (nobody's phoned me about the results of my chest x-ray, which is a good thing, I suppose). I don't
have any contact with them myself, but I'd hate if this got passed on to any young kids. And I'm not 100% sure. My
paroxysms don't last very long, and I never really had the sneezing or runny nose symptoms... Bronchitis still seems to
fit as well, except that it's not responding to the antibiotics.
This sucks. The smog isn't helping, either. Less than five minutes after stepping outside after work yesterday, it feld
like my whole chest was being crushed in a vice. I'm feeling okay now, but I'm dreading leaving the office. Fortunately,
I'll be going home on the weekend, and I think I'll make my parents turn the air conditioning on while I'm there. That
should help.
Yesterday was my birthday. My twenty-sixth, in fact. I'm not entirely sure what to think about that. Twenty-five I could
handle. But my internal image of what a twenty-six-year-old should be like is a little incongruous with my internal
image of, well, me. Of course, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise. I still have a hard time dealing with the idea
that I might be a grown-up.
My birthday kind of snuck up on me, really. I hadn't been thinking about it very much, except that my birthday would
obviously be the ideal day for me to get a chest X-ray done.
But as the day progressed, I received several unexpected and really rather heart-warming gestures from a number of
people. And I'm afraid I may have been a little too stunned at the time to show how much I appreciated it (which isn't
anything new, unfortunately). I'm not just saying this because some of you might be reading, either!