My afternoon

So I’ve been very ill as of late, and this morning seemed to be the peak of it. BUT, I had a friend in town for a few hours so I wasn’t going to let my illness, whatever it may be, ruin our fun. We spent the morning looking for breakfast, heading up to the Hollywood sign, then the Hollywood reservoir, then ended up at Forest Lawn, which I’d never been to.

There are some pretty nice mosaics there, but the whole time, I’m freezing cold, coughing, wearing a hoody, while everyone else was sweating in the hot weather of the San Fernando Valley. After a few more stops, I finally talked him into running me to the doctor before leaving town to return to a flyover state.

I spent four hours at the doctor’s office, shivering or asleep most of the time. They ran a few standard tests, determined I’m running a fever, and figured out that I feel like death warmed over. Then they gave me a lung capacity test. It’s basically like a medical version of a breath-a-lizer, except it measures lung capacity. You have to breathe in as much air as you can, then exhale as fast as you can, until you’ve completely exhaled all you can.

This triggered a major head rush, plus kicked in my whooping cough like fits. As I was coughing I handed the device back to the nurse and coughingly said “‘ere, it hits pretty hard.” This of course had the room in stitches. And for those of you that don’t get that, I’m not explaining it.

Somewhere in there I got some x-rays where they pretty much told me I’m fucked. I failed the lung capacity test three times, feinting once, before they finally told me they didn’t feel safe with me taking further tests.

So here I am, finally at home, thanks to my neighbors Zoli and Makiko who picked me up. I have three medications, one for cough that’s also a narcotic. It’s supposed to make me sleep through the next few days. I’m also now on steroids, and I was given a pretty powerful antibiotic. I was told to go home and sleep until Thursday, then come back for more tests to see if it’s okay for me to go back to work.

And what do I have?

Severe bronchitis and a sinus infection. And I need to lose more weight. Yay…