(said with faint sarcasm…)
Awhile back, one of the very few competent physicians I’ve seen at Kaiser in Oakland told me I was asthmatic, and this was the cause of a chronic cough. A particularly pernicious and determined cough that keeps me up at night, and interrupts conversations regularly. I have to revoke my use of the word “competent”, because the cough never ceased with asthma meds. To add insult to injury, this was the most competentish doctor over seven years of being insured by Kaiser. Which speaks volumes.
Well, no more Kaiser, thankfully. The cough has gotten progressively worse since that ad hoc diagnosis in September. As in, I’ll have a coughing jag that leads to me taking a gasping breath to refill my lungs for the next few coughing jags that breeze through the station, dragging a runaway sneezing fit behind ‘em. It starts off dry, but culminates in some classic clear sputum and phlegm. And don’t believe that whiny little bastard in those ads that says a blocked nose is about swollen sinuses, “That’s right…. BLAME THE MUCUS” with the dramatic pause and tone. Mucus is mucus. When you have a lot to siphon out, you have a lot to siphon out.
I had a chest x-ray a couple weeks ago which turned up absolutely nothing abnormal. Clear bronchial irritation but nothing to indicate pneumonia or any kind of growth. (Thank the cat and chicken gods.)
My followup yesterday was inconclusive. The NP is totally confuzzled. Her supervising doc is completely confuzzled. The next step is going to be a referral to a pulmonologist who will put me through a bronchoscopy, which will be a truly joyous adventure, I’m sure. The dood says he’ll wear Lucy like a feather boa and sneak her in to keep me calm under sedation. Clearly, he hasn’t actually asked her for permission to do that yet. Her stock answer for such ideas? “Myeh-eh-eh” as she’s running away.
On the bright side, I was able to fill a scrip for a cough suppressant peppered with codeine. With any luck, the codeine will deaden the coughing reflex and maybe I’ll get to sleep all night without waking up to flip over or to reposition my pillow angle for better sleeping. The NP interviewed me quite awhile about irritants, sources of irritation, illness history, and the like. All I had to tell her was, “I commuted on BART for 3.5 years, and BART commuters can be really disgusting,” and she made a face and said, “Yep, that’d shock your system to be around all those new combinations of germs.”
It really sucks the big one, though. I worked for over seven years at a recycling yard positioned between a city transfer station, and one of the last steel plants in the Bay Area (those assholes have been in litigation since I was hired, btw, for what? why neighborhood air contamination, my pretties…) As in all postmodern relationships between cities and industry, the city I worked in is that steel plant’s bitch. Things were bad enough that we used to get abrupt visits from the self-proclaimed “industrial hygienist” from the steel plant, basically saying, “Gee, we spent millions to improve our equipment so why are you guys still bitching about fumes?” I got so fed up with those visits that I finally had her for lunch one day, and asked how many steel plant defendants she is paid to testify on behalf of as an expert witness, and how exactly is she compensated for playing the literal devil’s advocate. Worked like a charm. Ask any asshole how much they are compensated for towing the party line to defend a gross polluter, and they tend to snap the shell closed and you never see or hear from them again. Unless you’re unlucky enough to wind up on the jury because a city finally told the steel plant to fuck off, and refused an out of court settlement.
The long and short of this adventure is that I am going to be partially sedated, and a doctor is going to thread a bronchoscope down my trachea and play peeping tom to my bronchial tubes, possibly scraping out material to biopsy if they find anything other than irritated tissue. I told Harry a short while ago and he totally read my mind, “Here’s hoping all they find is a bit of chicken fluff…” I can totally live with a poultry allergy. It just means I can’t hug and kiss my Delawares when I’m not blowing raspberries on their feathery bellies and courting danger (I’d love that to be a joke, but I’ve met a crazy self-proclaimed urban farmer who damn near slips bunny kits the tongue when smooching on them; the dood almost fainted when she breezed past him stinking of liver enzymes.)
Speaking of poultry, I gotta go outside and refill the peepers’ feeder yet again, and set them loose for lunchtime recess. Pancho lives to ‘herd’ them. He defines herding as following the cluckers around and dodging getting pecked on the ass, btw.
They should be done by 7:30pm, woohoo! Improvement over last year when they were done on the kitchen stove around 9pm.
