Monday

I took the day off from work for a pair of doctor’s appointments. The first was a follow-up chest x-ray to see if my lungs are all clear from the pneumonia. They’re not quite, despite improvement, so I go back for another x-ray in a month. What fun. The second appointment was just a physical, which I was supposed to have a couple of weeks ago, but which got cancelled when my doctor was sick. Aside from the obvious fact that I need to diet and exercise more, it was a clean bill of health.

I spent the rest of the day watching three seasons of The Guild online.

Getting better all the time

Hopefully you never noticed the spam links my site has been infected with for the past couple of days. Hopefully your browser was never hijacked by the redirects and deposited in distinctly NSFW areas of the web. I’m apparently not alone in the recent hack, but reinstalling WordPress, changing the necessary passwords, and deleting malicious code from one PHP file at a time seems to have done the trick. (If you’re running WordPress yourself, you might want to check your own site; it’s not yet clear if this was a problem confined to my own host, Dreamhost.)

My website is not the only thing slowly getting better. I, too, am on the mend. I went to my doctor this morning for a follow-up, and, aside from a prescription for another chest x-ray in April and a recommendation to take it easy and rest when I need to — “people do still die of pneumonia” — I’m good to go back to work. Next week probably won’t be the least stressful time, given recent (and unexpected) changes and meetings planned all week — even sick, I had an hour-plus meeting I sat in on — but I’m at a point where I want and need to go back, and feel like I’m up to it. I mean, I’ve run out of 30 Rock episodes to watch on Netflix.

Of course, I will make sure I go to bed early on Sunday. I’ve already got Daylight Savings Time working against me.

Brand pneumonia

So I stayed home from work again this morning. My doctor’s office called to confirm the pneumonia diagnosis and to schedule a follow-up appointment for this Friday. I’ve also been prescribed an additional antibiotic and told I should probably stay home this week and rest. Now is maybe not the best time for me to be taking a whole bunch of sick days all at once — which I’ll actually have to supplement with vacation days — but next week would probably be worse, as would not letting my body recuperate from the pneumonia at all. So, while this really isn’t the sort of “week away from the office” I like, I may just have to accept that it’s necessary.

Of course, I think I’d rather be at work than at home watching movies like Tiny Furniture on Netflix. (Everything Noel Murray says here is accurate, although I might have leaned more towards a C grade.

The weak ender

Being sick on a Friday afternoon can be a hassle. Even if you go to all the trouble of going to the doctor’s office, and then going for the chest x-ray that your doctor prescribes for you, you’re bumping up against the fact that both offices are likely going to be closed over the weekend, taking with it any chance that you might have, for instance, of finding out if you actually have pneumonia like the tech who performed your x-ray said you did. You might find that, even if you can reach a nurse at your doctor’s office — because they’re open on Saturday mornings, mostly for blood work — she won’t have been faxed the x-rays the day before, won’t be able to reach the radiology office because they’re not open Saturday mornings, and won’t be able to tell you anything different until Monday.

So, yeah, I’m pretty much committed to the antibiotics I’m on now, and it will have to wait until Monday to find out if I need to do anything different or more to combat the small infection that might or might not be in my one lung. On the plus side, though, the throat culture came back negative, so it would appear I don’t have strep.

I don’t know if it’s the power of suggestion, but it’s like my body has taken the idea that I might have pneumonia and run with it…by which I mean, decided to be more run-down. I knew I’d been a little more tired more often recently, but I really just thought that was a side effect of the cold I knew I’d had. But I spent most of today lying down, doing nothing much more interesting than watching episodes of South Park and 30 Rock.

This evening, I watched The Innkeepers, which is quite slow but also very effectively scary. It’s well paced and looks great, and I really liked the lead performances. The ending is something of a mixed bag, but with this and House of the Devil, director Ti West remains somebody to watch.

Beyond that? Well, I’m unfortunately not the only sick one in the house. Our dog, Tucker, very suddenly started having trouble walking, clearly unwilling or unable to put pressure on his left front paw. There’s nothing clearly wrong with the paw — no cuts, no bleeding, no sharp dog teeth trying to keep you away when you poke at it — so we’ll likely have to take him to the vet at the start of next week. He seems otherwise fine, so we didn’t take him to the emergency vet, and it’s possible it’s more old age than injury. (He’ll be nine at the end of the month; he and I actually share a birthday.) But if it doesn’t get better, there’s not much we can do beyond petting him and giving him the occasional aspirin.

And that’s really the awful thing: forcing him to go outside, because…well, because he’s a dog, and dogs don’t have litter boxes, and watching him suffer and struggle along. And not being able to do anything about it.

My maybe-pneumonia doesn’t seem so bad for all that.

Sicky McSickerson

If you’d told me when I woke up this morning that, before the end of the afternoon, I’d be having a chest x-ray and getting a diagnosis of a little pneumonia, I’m not sure I would have believed you. But such is the way of things, eh?

I wasn’t feeling great this morning. As I might have mentioned, I’ve been tired and walking around with this nagging cough for the past couple of weeks. Most of the other symptoms of the cold that originally came with it (and kept me home sick one day already) have gone away, or at least subsided, but the cough got bad enough this morning that I decided to go to the doctor. (Not to be gross or too-much-information-y about this, but I did cough up a little blood.) So I called (or rather e-mailed) in sick and scheduled an appointment for later in the morning.

She started me on antibiotics for the throat, recommended fluids and some simple remedies, and gave me a prescription for a chest x-ray just to be safe. My breathing seemed fine, she said — “I don’t think you have pneumonia” — but since I’ve had these symptoms for more than a week, better safe than sorry.

Luckily, I was able to schedule the x-ray for this afternoon. (I have a limited number of sick days, and I’m not eager for this to eat into them all at the start of the year.) It was over pretty quick; I spent more time filling out paperwork beforehand and sitting in a tiny waiting area afterward. (And let me tell you, if you’re not sick going into that, sitting in close quarters with a bunch of other people getting chest x-rays for twenty minutes just might make you so.) And imagine my surprise when the technician told me there was a little pneumonia on the one lung. Didn’t he understand I was just here to play it safe? I was just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, so to speak?

Well, I have been a little more tired recently. And lord knows, I’m not just imagining this cough. But still: I knew I was sick, but apparently I’m more sick than I thought.

I still haven’t had it confirmed by my doctor. I was able to reach her office before they closed, but they hadn’t received the x-ray films, much less had a chance to look at them yet. It’s all complicated by today being Friday, of course, and the office being closed all weekend. Plus, I’ve already started the antibiotics I was prescribed. I’m going to try calling tomorrow morning, to talk with one of the other doctors in the practice if I can — that’s what the woman who answered the phone and made a note on my chart said I could do — and find out if I should be doing something else, starting another or different antibiotic, whatever.

That, plus plenty of rest, looks to be my only weekend plans. Exciting times, I know. I am hoping I can get this squared away — if not, you know, cured — quickly, without having to take more time off from work. Although I suppose pneumonia is a pretty valid excuse, even if it’s not the best time of year and job-wise for me to be taking sick.

For now, though, it’s plenty of fluids and an early night of it.

Hopefully when I call tomorrow, they won’t also tell me my throat culture was positive for strep. (I’ve had that once before, and it definitely knocked me out of commission for a week.)