Now I need to reread Catch-22

I read Catch-22 on a glorious boondoggle of a high school senior trip to Mahabalipuram, India, on the southern east coast near Chennai.  I remember our faculty chaperones being utterly uninterested in doing anything more than hanging out on the beach or relaxing with a cigarette and a drink at the hotel bar, and they were happy to leave us to do the same.  We might have had an "educational" excursion or two just to save face, but for the most part we partied and hung out on the beach and hooked up with our significant others.

And I read Catch-22, which I adored, from the very first line ("It was love at first sight.").

I only mention this because I was thinking about what Catch-22 means -- a paradoxical situation from which a person cannot escape because of contradictory rules.  In the book, the Catch-22 was the fact that the only way to get out of flying more missions was to claim insanity, but the very act of doing so was evidence of sanity.

This is all a very long and pretentious segue into telling you about how I was finally given medication, but only after being sick for 11 days first.

A little over a week and a half ago, I woke up with a sore throat.  Later that day, I realized it was nasal drip from my sinuses down to the top of my trachea.  Then my trachea would become irritated and I would start to cough.  Soon I had constant runny nose, runny back-of-the-throat, rasping cough, and resulting sore windpipe.  It was painful and seriously fucking annoying.

I called in to my doctor and talked to one of the nurse practitioners to see if I needed to come in.  I described my symptoms and the nurse said, "well, it sounds like a viral cold, and those can take up to 10 days to clear up.  So I would wait a little more [at that point it had only been 7 days] and if it's not clearing up, then give us a call back."

It didn't get better.  The cough persisted, the congestion in my head increased, I was exhausted the time, and I had a low grade fever that wasn't enough to send me to the hospital, but enough to leave me feeling like crap.

Finally, this morning, I had had enough.  I went to my doctor's after care place and was told that what had started as a viral cold had been festering long enough that it had become a bacterial infection.

"That tends to happen if it hasn't gotten better after 7 days."

So there's the rub.  They won't give out antibiotics if they think it's viral, but the time it takes to wait it out virtually guarantees it will become bacterial, so you eventually get the meds, but not until you've already been coughing up a lung for 11 days.

In any event, I now have super-strong antibiotics (for which they also gave me yeast infection medication, "because it's bound to happen with the strength of this medication" -- whee!!), prescription nasal spray, and prescription cough drops (which I didn't even know existed).

I will recuperate by digging up my copy of one of my favorite books.