My enemy now has a name

Last Monday or so, I developed some breathing problems.  Then I started getting that all-over body ache thing going on.  Then I developed a cough.  By Wednesday of last week, the cough was one of those that felt like your ribcage was exploding, your skull was imploding, and basically made your eyelashes hurt afterward.  So that evening I decided to head over to Prompt Care at the Wabash Medical Clinic, where after a while they declare I have a respiratory tract infection, give me some cefuroxime and some nighttime codeine juice, and send me on my way.

By the time last Friday rolls around, I feel like complete and total hammered poo.  I can’t breathe, I can’t eat, I can’t sleep.  I break out into these spontaneous cold sweats about seven times an hour.  I “feel” hungry, but every time I start to eat something I get so nauseous I think I’m going to hurl.  Still coughing like a… coughing… thing every 40 seconds or so, and it seems to alternate between a couple reasonably harmless quick little coughs that produce a tablespoon of lungbutter and a totally dry 25-second ultra-painful cough-a-thon.

And bedtime?  Forget it.  Even with my nectar of the codeine gods, I sleep like a dream- for about 40 minutes.  Then I am up almost regularly, throughout the night, coughing up vital organs and spitting out this pale yellow stuff.  This is how I spent all of Labor Day weekend.  I’m honestly kinda surprised Mrs. Johann didn’t make me sleep in the back yard.  I probably would have made me sleep in the back yard.

ANY-hooze, on Sunday night Mrs. Johann gives me a shot of her albuterol inhaler before bed.  Relatively speaking, I felt positively swell the next morning.  I was still up throughout the night coughing, but it was just a simple little *cough* and then back to sleep, at least compared to how Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights went.  So I got to wondering if albuterol was the magic drug I was missing, if I simply turned a corner and was getting better, or if it was all some big coinkydink.

So last night we go down to Mario’s for dinner.  Tortellini soup and seafood lasagna, if you’re wondering.  Mrs. Johann and I are talking about it, and she asks if I want her to drop me off at Prompt Care after dinner.  Which basically meant, “I’m dropping you off at Prompt Care after dinner”.  So being the intellajint guy I am, I said, “Sure”.  Well, thank hebb’m I did.

Don’t know whether they missed it the first time or whether it developed in the mean time, but this is my ailment:

My cooties

Bacterial pneumonia.  That is what has been kicking my ass for the last week and a half or so.

I honestly wasn’t planning to go back to Prompt Care.  I just figured my “respiratory tract infection” was just a doozy, but the very foul-tasting antibiotics they prescribed for me would knock it out.  Dang, how wrong I was.  After a nebulizer treatment and two x-rays later, doctor dude pulls me outside into the hall, shows me the films, and says, “congratulations, you have pneumonia”.

I was thrilled, actually.

Yeah, I know, people die from pneumonia, but at least now A, we know what the hell is wrong with me illness I have, and B, we can actually treat it.  So he gave me a different antibiotic (I’m not upset by that, since cefuroxime tastes like ass) and gave me my very own inhaler (Xopenex).  I swear, I would have never thought I’d ever be so happy to hear a diagnosis of pneumonia.

I admit last night was a bit rough; I did wind up sleeping downstairs so as to let Mrs. Johann sleep as soundly as possible.  But I had my inhaler, my cell phone, and my ibuprofen on the table next to me, so I got through it well enough.  Hopefully I’ll be well-armed enough to knock this crap out before I have to get on the plane to California a week from Friday.  They’ll probably never let me get on a plane hacking and coughing the way I am now.

And I am getting on that plane.