I Hope It's Not Contagious

The desire to be stoic and avoid the doctor or Western medication at all costs runs in my family. I wonder if it's hereditary? My father consumes massive amounts of fluids and Vitamin C when he has any sort of illness, and my grandmother scoffed at so much as an Advil when she had any sort of malady. Allowing myself to think that I can cure myself with something so small as some carrot juice and zinc supplements is almost magical in it's simplicity.

HOWEVER....

The truth it that I can only hack, wheeze and cough so much before my weakened little mind screams out to seek professional consult.

Running to my favorite doctor is exactly what I did the day after my last post. Apparently I have asthmatic bronchitis. Awesome. I have been on a steady regimen of antibiotics, allergy medicine and multiple inhalers.

Yeah, that's right. Not one, but TWO inhalers. I'll bet you're so jealous. Pause for a minute and think about that super popular kid in your middle school that toted around an inhaler and every so often whipped that puppy out, shook it like a Polaroid picture and took a deep drag. Oh wait. You can't conjure that image? That's because a super popular kid with an inhaler is something that doesn't fucking exist.

Now conjure the realistic image of that dorky kid who regularly hacked up a lung in your Bio class because it was in the basement and his sensitive system couldn't handle the mold so he got transferred to another class and you all laughed at him and pointed when he passed in the hallways.....(much easier to call up that image, right?)...multiply that image by two and you've got me. The medical community really needs to speed up development of a medication that has a hip reputation, like hallucinogens. Chop-chop, medical community!

I now regularly engage in covert missions to sneak to my office during conferences to sip on the sweet powdery relief from my new plastic buddies. Everyone knows. It's almost shameful.

After my days of tiptoe-ing around at work, I want to just veg out on the couch and surf mindlessly around on the inter-web. (Inhalers and an uncontrollable impulse to call it the inter-web, I think the bronchitis came with a heaping side of 'geek'.) But the universe had other plans. It said "oh no no no Miss Rainey, not so fast! Your computer will come down with a deathly illness as well! MuhahahahahHAAAAAA!!!!"

My poor, unsuspecting computer! Is it possible that through my close proximity to my computer I gave it a virus? I am not sure if human-computer contagion is even possible. I ran for my inhaler, trying to treat the computer the only way I knew how. The USB port looked like a natural match for the mouthpiece of the second inhaler, so I attached the plastic device and gave it a life-infusing blast of medicine. It didn't do anything! I briefly toyed with the idea of sharing my antibiotics, but there was no suitably sized outlet. Out of ideas, I panicked and started pressing buttons. Wrong thing to do.

Ok, apparently last thing you want to do when confronted with a computer virus is randomly press buttons. Or force useless medications on your computer. Blame it on the fever. Thankfully Chris is something of a computer whisperer and will be in the process of fixing my computer this weekend.

Until then it's just me and my inhaler. Correction: Inhalers.