seeking pity ;-)

I came down with strep throat yesterday -yay- and regained my sympathy for all boring patients who just have "a cold" or "the flu".

Yesterday was miserable, I felt like I just wanted to curl up into a ball. My body hurt from just sitting up and I couldn't help feeling sorry for myself. And it was one of those days when we were in class nonstop from 9am to 8pm. My misery was particularly pitiful since I came to school with two of my heavily pregnant friends, who have to happily deal with their bladders, intestines, nerves, and vital organs being compressed, kicked and stretched on a regular basis. After complaining a few times and realizing my suffering could not compare, I popped an acetominophen and felt amazingly better. (funny how those drugs actually do work)

Over the years, I've come to realize that I'm particularly sensitive to fevers. Raise my body temp a few degrees and I can barely move, raise it a few more, and I babble in Polish and become paranoid. At the same time, I've come to view fevers as the best solution to all infections, and though all those fever suppressing drugs make me feel normal again, I always fear that they just prolong the infection. So last night, I stopped taking my medicine and went to bed for a therapeutic night of feverish sleep. I woke up soaking wet less than an hour later. My temperature was 104.5 degrees, my heart was racing and everything in the room was blurry. Paranoid that I would fry my brain (future doctors are such drama queens!), I popped two aspirin and drank a lot of water. An hour after that, I woke up again, this time feeling like I had just emerged from hot stuffy room into the pleasant air outside. I could still barely swallow without peeing my pants, but everything else felt so wonderful that I really didn't care. There goes my attempt at natural healing.