The Doctor

     Yesterday -- finally -- I went to the drive-through doctor.  This was the one I used to go to, three miles away; they're practical and...  Um.  Last week, I went to the closest one, under a different company, and they looked at my nasty bruise with the ol' Mark I medical eyeball and sent me on to a fancier place -- but played diagnostic-code bingo in their billing and scored nearly a grand overall, mostly from my insurance.

     (Okay, fine; I don't know how much deeply-informed, serious doctor-type thinking went on and I wouldn't have the least notion what a fair price tag for it looks like.  It seemed like hyper-Cadillac medicine to me and I am okay with a used Chevy: most of the things that go wrong with us were diagnosable by 1925 and treatable by 1947, so firing up the chrome-plated hovercraft and its onboard quantum computer might be a bit more than is called for.  I paid the bill and I won't be back.)

     After a nightmarish drive past sidewalk-repair crews working in the rain, I walked my wheezy, coughing self into the quickie clinic, masked for the benefit of anyone downwind, and they did the usual: vitals, listen to my breathing (we both discovered I could not cycle a deep breath without a coughing spell), history of the complaint.  She called it for severe bronchitis and some other stuff, and wrote me for heavy-duty cough syrup, a Z-pack of antibiotics, and, initially a steroid.  She switched that to a rescue inhaler after checking my chart: Prednisone (isn't that a radiator fluid?) has a very bad effect on me.  Elapsed time, slightly longer than it takes for your blood pressure to settle down.

     They called in the prescriptions and I went over to the North Campus, close to my drugstore, figuring the place needed a walk-through and I needed a sit-down.  Once there, my phone binged with a depressingly-distant ETA for the medicine -- and an offer to jump the line, if I needed the stuff sooner.  I pushed that button on first sight, caught my breath, did the walk-through, caught my breath, and before too long, I was in the line at the pharmacy drive-up, which took a mere twenty minutes to get through.  Even before COVID, the expansion and collapse of the drugstore business had things messed up, but they are starting to catch up. 

     I'm feeling better, but exhausted.  The strong cough syrup makes me dizzy and my lungs and sinuses are emptying and emptying; but I slept in a couple of solid four-hour chunks last night, less-tormented and deeper than I have managed for a week.  My knees do still hurt, but the other joint aches are fading.