Sick

It's been a long time, I know! Last Saturday was a Typhoon Day- work was cancelled but it never really rained that hard. Pretty windy and rainy in the evening. It rained hard the next couple of days- harder than during Typhoon Day- but still had to go to work and stuff.

I thought I got a cold in the middle of the week- normal achiness and sore throat. But by Thursday my throat and ears really hurt. Yesterday my throat was all inflamed and pussy so I cancelled my tutoring for this morning and went to the doctor. It's the one my roommate went to and liked. The staff was very nice, and spoke a little English and helped me fill out the forms- just name, address and phone number, which I could do in Chinese characters but it takes so long. It's still a weird experience- like the nurse checked my ear temperature right at the reception desk, then they gave me just a normal drinking cup to pee in- not a biomedical cup at all- it was so cute, the nurse was like, "I'm sorry, I don't know the English words" so she pantomimed what I should do with the cup- and after they tested the urine they had me go flush it down the toilet. Hmmm.

The doctor was nice and his English was great. He kept pressing on places I guess to check the lymph nodes and asking if it hurt, which was weird- it always did hurt, but only when he pressed really hard, and it seems if you press really hard anywhere it will hurt. He said I had a throat infection (never heard of that before) and a little bit of a bladder infection. He kept saying, "Do you work hard everyday?" and I was like, uh, most days I work pretty hard, and he said "Yes, that's why you have a bladder infection. You work hard everyday." I really didn't understand.

He said he'd give me medicine for "3 or 4 days, to get rid of the infection," and I asked if it was an antibiotic and he said yes and I said I didn't mind paying for extra medicine to take the antibiotic for its full course. And he said, "No, it's fine, just take the medicine and you will feel better!" Sigh.

So I got the crazy Taiwanese little packets of pills to take every 4 hours- like 5 pills at a time. I looked them up online and of the ones I could find, one is an antibiotic for the treatment of ringworm, and one is a muscle relaxer, and one is Sudafed. Hmm. The other I couldn't find. But what can you do. I kept waking myself up last night when I swallowed because my throat hurt so bad, and I'm wearing a long-sleeve shirt and scarf at work, so let's hope the ringworm medicine cures my "Throat infection."