A terrible week so far…
May. 21, 2008 by ravishan
I went home after lunch last Friday and attempted to return to work this morning (Wednesday), but didn’t last too long… So, I went back home and tried to rest. Unfortunately, resting and I don’t go well together. So, on Friday night, I was on my computer as usual and catching up on things, watching baseball and then finally tried to sleep. I could not sleep at all. I had such severe pain in my throat that I just could not sleep. Tylenol dumped me for the first time!!!
I did the usual salt water gargling in the middle of the night, trying not to generate too much noise and wake everyone else up… Then, in desperation, I looked up on the web and found that adding cayenne pepper and gargling will simply get rid of the bugs after a few gargles. What a great idea! We have a lot of cayenne pepper of the highest “heat” factor, so I used it with the salt water. It was awesome… but did nothing! The bacteria probably enjoyed the cocktail too!
I am very reluctant to go to the doctor for things like this because most of the time they look at you like you are from another planet… It is either that I have a cold or flu (if I asked about that flu shot, it was always my fault – either I took it too early or too late) or that I have viral infection and that it has to run its course (3-5 days). I have had to suffer, but usually the Tylenol takes care of the pain and I have always been able to sleep. Not like this.
So when the doctor took the throat culture and came back to tell me that I do have strep, I was delighted… I was prescribed Amoxycilin, which I gladly took. But, no changes Saturday night… Same issues, no sleep, a lot of pain. Called the doctor and she prescribed a stronger pain medication. That helped somewhat, but the pain would come back in 2 hours and I have to eagerly await the 4 hours to come by so I can dunk yet another pill. I felt terrible doing this. I thought about those cancer patients and others affected by certain illnesses who suffer from such terrible pains that the medicines cannot offer any relief…
So, we went back to the doc on Monday I had to recount all my sufferings in detail to the doctor all over again. I told her about the phlegm and the sound it makes. ‘Aha!’ we didn’t have that on saturday.. ‘Let me listen to you’. It so reminded me of a programmer telling the functional person ‘Aha, you never mentioned to me that such a condition could exist so I could code for it!’ I was asked to stop the amoxycilin and move to Zithromax.
So I did. The pains basically went away. Why could she not have prescribed this on Saturday? Of course, I have no idea why the pain went away, nor do I care. But this is really the state of medicine or programming for that matter – the system that you are trying to understand is so complex, that there is a lot of trial error going on before a fix is found.
I am always amazed at the power of the body to tolerate all these medications and combinations of them and respond. I am skeptical that all doctors necessarily understand the complexities surrounding the interactions between medications when they prescribe them to you. For example, if you are already on diabetic medications, is Amoxycilin effective when taken along with them? Or should something different be done to make it more effective?
Whereas I am thankful the Zithromax cured my unbearable pain, I forgot to tell you that I took it with a pepcid ac (because I had terrible heartburn)… The next morning, I noticed that the label says Zithromax should not be taken with an antacid!!!