I Almost Died

So I've been sick for over a month now, just picking up the various bugs as they go around--wouldn't want to miss anything! I'm not a big fan of going to the doctor, 'cause it always seems like you pays yer money, they thump you a little bit, and then announce that "it'll pass". Well, on Tuesday, the cough that has been a constant throughout all these bugs had gotten to the point where it was making my kidneys hurt, so I figured it might be time to go see a medico. So off I go, and the doc sez my lungs sound clear, maybe I just have a touch of bronchitis. I leave the office with a prescription for a Z-Pack (antibiotics) and some Hycodan, a codeine cough syrup.

At home, I finish up dinner and then slurp down some of the Hycodan, hoping that at the very least it'll knock me out and let me have a good night's sleep for the first time in days. Au contraire, monsieur! Where codeine usually has a nice intoxicating and tranquilizing effect on most people, apparently I'm in that oh-so-special one percent that has quite a different influence. Long story short, it made me jittery, unable to sleep, and caused some lovely delusions. The regular readers of this blog are fortunate I didn't call them at two in the morning to warn them of the impending invasion of UFOs made of chocolate chip cookie dough. I ended up being hallucinatory and panicky for about 30 hours, and was too tense to sleep for another ten hours or so. All night, I would start to pass out from utter exhaustion, and then would suddenly snap awake seconds later...experiencing this over and over again threatened to drive me absolutely insane, and for a while there, I couldn't imagine ever escaping the grip of this demon. It was like descriptions I've read of heroin addiction, except I never got to feel the cool part of the heroin.

Anyway, the Hycodan finally passed through my system, but I'm still exhausted even after sleeping for ten hours. My supervisor at work was kind enough to call and check up on me and give me advice that didn't occur to my fever-addled brain, like eating crackers to absorb the codeine syrup. She also told me to go ahead and take the rest of the week off to rest and recuperate. At the moment, I'm just tired and sniffling and coughing a lot. I'll take "generally yucky" over "hallucinating and thinking you're about to die" any day.