Thursday, July 12, 2007

A Little Bit of My Day

The last few days, Anthropapa and I have been stricken with nasty sore throats, which now have the added bonus thrill of swollen, painful lymph nodes.

So this morning I decided to see if I could tell if I have strep throat. I went to the bathroom, grabbed my toothbrush, and said aaahhh, gag, ack.

Then I realized that I couldn’t see a damn thing back there, and so I went to get a flashlight from the bedroom. Then I realized I had no idea where to find one (bad emergency planning, I know) even though we probably own at least a dozen Maglites in various sizes. (Note: after reading that linked page, I must assure you that we only use our mini Maglites for lighting, not weaponry!)

Then I remembered that Anthropapa had one in his desk the other day, because we swapped out the batteries for our DVD remote (priorities set right: video entertainment over emergency preparedness!)

I found said flashlight, and opened it to see if it had any batteries after the DVD remote resuscitation efforts. As I did this, I dropped the little cap end of the battery compartment, and it rolled under Anthropapa’s desk.

This was a major problem. I bent down to check under the desk gingerly as those lymph nodes in my neck protested the change in position. After fishing out an ungodly amount of cat-hair bunnies, paper clips, old junk mail envelopes, and such (I’m probably revealing a little bit too much here about our sad lack of cleanliness. I’m too tired to edit it back out), I recovered the cap.

Then I found some old and possibly dead batteries on my desk, tried to put them into the flashlight, and somehow jammed one of them in there. I tried to get it out with tweezers, which did not succeed at all. In frustration I banged that battery even deeper into the flashlight.

Thankfully Anthropapa came home for lunch just then, got the jammed battery out with his manly strength, and found me a working flashlight.

Then I realized I would have to gag myself again. Sigh.

After shooing Anthropapa out of the bathroom (I somehow felt squeamish about having someone watch me do this) I bravely took hold of the toothbrush in one hand, and the brightly shining flashlight in the other, and did the deed.

Nothing unsightly back there that I could see, but we’ll try to see the doctor tomorrow just to be sure.

Coming soon: strep throat, mononucleosis, or...diphtheria? Stay tuned!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yuck! I hope it's moved on a little. I suppose industrial strength antibiotics are out of the question?

Henitsirk said...

Well, if it had continued on that path I would have taken antibiotics for strep throat. But it seems to have moved on to the thick sinus goop stage, so I'll assume it's just a nasty cold, which antibiotics wouldn't help.

Definitely yuck. Keep your fingers crossed for me, the kids haven't shown any signs of it yet.

Anonymous said...

I hope you're both continuing to get better. There is very little worse (simply because there's little you can do except wait them out) than those horrible, nasty colds, especially in summer.

Anonymous said...

I hope you're feeling better, and I hope I didn't give you my cyber-germs! It's awful when you feel ill, especially when you've got young kids to look after. Today Kiko and I managed to go to the park and have a normal day for the first time in about 10 weeks, which felt like a miracle. You don't realise how bad you've been feeling until you're better!

(Oh, and I can relate to the housekeeping stuff - I found a shriveled bit of apple under the sofa today, I don't even want to analyse how long that's been there).