Pillpopper, MD

So, on Sunday, my throat started hurting, and I was like, "Shit, I'm getting a cold."

But I never got one. My throat persisted in hurting, but there were no sniffles, no niggling cough, no shivers or aches. Just that damned sore throat, hurting all day.

I went to bed on the early side on Sunday night, and slept really poorly all night. I kept waking up in terrible throat pain, dreamed about throat pain and swollen lymph nodes [my own]. When I woke up on Monday morning, I felt absolutely wrecked, so I did what any normal human being would do--skipped my classes on my first day back from Spring Break.

Of course, I did this mostly for the benefit of my classmates--at this point, with my intensely painful throat in the absence of other cold symptoms, I was worried I had strep. Strep is pretty contagious, and medical students are psychotic, and I had a pretty good feeling that exposing 168 other medical students to my plague would make me about as popular as Lorena Bobbitt at a nude beach.

So, after doing Mexican Monday with Joe, who had also stayed out of school and who I promised not to lick [amidst threats of "If you give me strep, I'll kill you], I ambled over to Student Health Services to get myself checked out.

They ran a strep test, which came back negative, but decided--with vague references to Lamictal being a mild immune suppressant [which I hadn't heard]--to give me the antibiotics, which just adds to my daily pill allotment. Add in the Tylenol that I've been taking to control the pain, and you have, in one day...

4ish Tylenols, 2 antibiotics, 3 25 mg pills of Lamictal, one multivitamin, one cranberry concentrate capsule, and one birth control pill.

Whew. All this from someone who used to--and kind of still does--hate the doctor.

I need some sleep.