Doctors Without Ideas

For the last 14 days but who's counting, I have been suffering from a condition we shall call bronchitis, for lack of a better word. It started as a common cold but then morphed into a monstrous cough that overtook my lungs and entire body. Several COVID tests were negative. Eventually I threw caution to the wind and involved the professional medical community, such as it is.

First I went to something called "Urgent Care." You'd think with a name like that they would put their best people on it, but instead I was seen by a young woman, who knows how old she was since she wore a mask but if I had to guess I'd say 28, who listened to my chest through a stethoscope and declared my lungs free of any rattles, thus antibiotics would not work since it must be viral. I was sent home with a prescription for prednisone tablets, one to be taken once a day for the next four days. They did nothing.

Next I went to my primary care physician, or what used to be called the Family Doctor. He listened to my lungs through a stethoscope and said they were clear and so no pneumonia, then declared it "a cough." His exact words were, "Coughs are hard." He prescribed Tylenol with Codeine so I could sleep at night, and said to call him back if I didn't get better in a week.

So I called back in a week and the doc ordered a chest x-ray and a prescription for an antibiotic. The x-ray was normal and the antibiotic made me feel better after just one pill. I said how come an antibiotic if it's viral, and the nurse said that the doc told her, "It must have turned into a bacterial infection."