I am writing on this, my birthday, from the place I generally find myself in August/September…  Laid up sick in bed with a respiratory illness.  Since the first time I fell ill with pneumonia as a teenager until today, I have found that most years I get one serious lung infection a year, complete with fevers, body aches, secondary infections, coughing, lungs filling up with fluid, the works.  It’s not a normal cold or flu, it’s something that starts with allergies and asthma and then I pick up some sort of virus and within a few days I also pick up a bacterial infection, and it’s generally only when I have a fever in the 103+ range and find myself unable to breathe that a doctor is wiling to bestow upon me antibiotics, which unerringly clear the whole mess up in less than 24 hours.  

I’m currently running a 100.5 fever on the fifth day of being sick.  It’s my birthday.  I’m bored.  I’m annoyed.  I’m angry.

The thing I don’t get, is why do I have to go through this almost every year?  It’s the most predictable pattern in the world.  I have experienced this at least 20 times.  It’s like clockwork.  And yet, I always go in, I tell them about my history, they tell me that it’s probably a virus and they can’t do anything, I come back a couple days later on the verge of death, and then they give me the fucking antibiotics and I get better after needlessly suffering for a week.  .I need to find a lung/allergy/asthmaspecialist or something.  You would think that with my history any doctor with half a brain in their head would immediately put me on antibiotics to keep me from getting the secondary infection that I enviably get.  

It’s not like I don’t take precautions.  I have a whole regime of drugs and things that I do.  Every third year or so I am successful keeping it at bay.  This year isn’t looking like one of the successful years.