Today's Keyboard Smash
Sep. 23rd, 2021 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrubjayspeaksOh, friends, I have been laid low. I thought over the weekend that my vague malaise was due to having gotten my regular flu vaccine on Thursday after work. Oh, you naive fool. You precious idiot child. You thought your body was doing something normal.
No, it turns out the earache I woke up with Monday morning was just the next stage in the brewing Hell Infection developing in my ear for several days. It was a sneaky approach from behind, and then straight in with the cosmic curb stomp to my immune system. By Tuesday morning, I was a ruin, a shattered remnant of my former self.
Y'all think I'm joking, but understand: I felt so sick, I left work early and then went directly to the doctor. Two behaviors that are basically contrary to my primary protocol. I missed two goddamn days of work! In a row!
Now I'm on antibiotics and steroids, which I guess is what you get when the doctor looks in your ear and then visibly recoils. I didn't think they let ANYBODY have antibiotics for ear infections anymore. All the exam rooms have posters up these days, explaining how a) it's probably viral and won't respond anyway and b) you're the reason we're all going to be conquered by super bacteria, you dirty, ear-having beast*.
The doctor warned me it would take a couple days for me to feel any improvement, which was both disappointing to this maniac who wanted to get back to work and also depressingly accurate. Two days later, I'm not so much feeling better as resigned to taking truly unacceptable quantities of acetaminophen to manage the pain. I did go back to work, an experience I only survived because things were quiet. My trainer was on vacation anyway, so there wasn't much I could do and no one I much had to talk to.
Also, it turns out being mostly deaf on one side of your head is very disorienting in the constant noise of the production floor. I feel like I'm hallucinating machine motor noises from all directions, and I'm not even there anymore. At least now I'll have a few nights in which I don't have to worry that I literally won't hear my alarm go off if I roll the wrong way while sleeping.
(*This is both a sharp departure from my youth and an inevitable conclusion to it, when my insistence on existing solely in a water-based medium for approximately seven months out of the year meant I was perpetually fighting off either swimmer's ear or a full-blown infection. They rotated me through every antibiotic they could source, trying not to have any repeats. I ended up having to take liquid ones. They had the texture of roughly-ground chalkboard chalk in slightly watered-down white glue. I thought I would die.)
No, it turns out the earache I woke up with Monday morning was just the next stage in the brewing Hell Infection developing in my ear for several days. It was a sneaky approach from behind, and then straight in with the cosmic curb stomp to my immune system. By Tuesday morning, I was a ruin, a shattered remnant of my former self.
Y'all think I'm joking, but understand: I felt so sick, I left work early and then went directly to the doctor. Two behaviors that are basically contrary to my primary protocol. I missed two goddamn days of work! In a row!
Now I'm on antibiotics and steroids, which I guess is what you get when the doctor looks in your ear and then visibly recoils. I didn't think they let ANYBODY have antibiotics for ear infections anymore. All the exam rooms have posters up these days, explaining how a) it's probably viral and won't respond anyway and b) you're the reason we're all going to be conquered by super bacteria, you dirty, ear-having beast*.
The doctor warned me it would take a couple days for me to feel any improvement, which was both disappointing to this maniac who wanted to get back to work and also depressingly accurate. Two days later, I'm not so much feeling better as resigned to taking truly unacceptable quantities of acetaminophen to manage the pain. I did go back to work, an experience I only survived because things were quiet. My trainer was on vacation anyway, so there wasn't much I could do and no one I much had to talk to.
Also, it turns out being mostly deaf on one side of your head is very disorienting in the constant noise of the production floor. I feel like I'm hallucinating machine motor noises from all directions, and I'm not even there anymore. At least now I'll have a few nights in which I don't have to worry that I literally won't hear my alarm go off if I roll the wrong way while sleeping.
(*This is both a sharp departure from my youth and an inevitable conclusion to it, when my insistence on existing solely in a water-based medium for approximately seven months out of the year meant I was perpetually fighting off either swimmer's ear or a full-blown infection. They rotated me through every antibiotic they could source, trying not to have any repeats. I ended up having to take liquid ones. They had the texture of roughly-ground chalkboard chalk in slightly watered-down white glue. I thought I would die.)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-24 01:07 am (UTC)Have you been told to go after the probiotics once you're done with the treatment?
(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-26 06:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-09-26 06:44 pm (UTC)