Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Infectious Disease

I've been fairly lucky this year health-wise.  Barring a nasty bout of food poisoning during my last day at Shmeens, I've really stayed rather healthy.  But all streaks must come to an end, and I caught a co-intern's cold during my last week of in-house surgery.

Now, I wasn't actually that mad about it, because I get a semi-annual cold at minimum and I was karmically due.  However, I am not the world's healthiest girl, and I am an even worse recoverer.  My entire body usually feels as though lying on my back with my arms and legs crinkled in the air with the occasional twitch would be the best course of action, and I typically walk around muttering "I just want to die" about three times an hour to reaffirm this.  My ears are blocked up, so everyone thinks I am ignoring them when I really just cannot catch a word, and I get irritable.  I am constantly hot and sweating, which is quite a feat for someone who is perpetually freezing.  Even more amazingly, I have lost my appetite and and started skipping lunch today in favor of the closest thing I could get to an IV bag full of green tea.  I am constantly exhausted, but having trouble sleeping because of the mega-doses of Sudafed that I have been popping to dry up my congestion, so I am taking Benadryls by the handful as well.  My asthma is flaring up, and I spent all of last night coughing and choking on gobs of yellow phlegm.

I am, in short, the perfect intern to be starting her rotation on Infectious Disease this week.  The irony's pretty obvious here, since I probably shouldn't be walking around sniffling and dripping and sneezing and coughing on people who are already deathly ill.  I'm never afraid of catching C. Diff or Acinetobacter or Klebsiella from the patients, but I figure they really don't need my cold.  But, in medicine, we really don't get sick days, so I've been dragging my ass in and trying to make up for my sorry state by actually wearing all those gloves and yellow gowns and masks that we're supposed to wear all of the time in the isolation rooms.

Or maybe I should be aiming to catch a little C. Diff to go with my cold.  At least, then, I'd lose weight.

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