Well, that was a little bit scary!
Last night, for the first time since I was two years old and ate a whole bottle of St. Joseph Baby Aspirin (I loved that orange flavor!), and had to get my stomach pumped (and yes, I do still remember that - how could I forget?), I went... (no, wait - there's the time when I was five and I was climbing onto the TV to reach something, and yes, my mom had told me not to do that, but I wasn't content to wait for her help, and the TV fell on my foot and broke all the bones) to the emergency room for my own malady and not someone else's.

It happened like this: Yesterday afternoon I went to the ENT for a check up, and while there, he used a local anesthetic in my nose so he could do something rather indelicate that I'd prefer not to discuss in this venue. That was about 4 pm. Later that evening, I took another dose of my antibiotic, plus a shot of the steroid spray the doctor had given me, and went to be early, about 8 pm, because I wasn't feeling well, but I couldn't sleep so I got back up around 10.

My ears and my throat were feeling so itchy. As the evening progressed, the itchiness did, too, until about 11 I couldn't stop coughing, and my whole neck and upper chest felt itchy too, so took a very large dose of liquid Benedryl, and told Mike I felt like it might be an allergic reaction to something. At that point, my throat closed up and I couldn't talk anymore!

I could still breathe okay, or we'd have gone straight to the emergency room.

If we still lived in the good old days, when all military bases had a fully-functioning hospital on base, we'd have gone straight to the emergency room.

But these are not the good old days, these are the New and Improved Days, where you can't go to a civilian emergency room without authorization from the military health care HMO (Did I ever mention that HMOs are the invention of the devil? Well, they are!), so Mike began the process of getting permission to take me.

First he called the HMO emergency number and waited and waited while it rang, then waited and waited on hold, and finally got a real live human being to talk to, and explained the situation. Then he hung up and waited while the HMO person called a doctor and explained it all to him to so he could call us back and tell us to do what we already knew we needed to do. After several minutes the doctor called, and Mike explained the whole sitation to him, in great detail, and the doctor said the Magic Words: "Take her to the emergency room."

So after half an hour of jumping through New and Improved Hoops (I'm sure that this is why that word, "Nih!" is so scary!), we set off for the emergency room of the hospital on the other side of town. Not the one closer to us where I had my surgery, oh no, that hospital, for some reason (New and Improved, I'm sure) is not on the emergency room list.

By the time we got there, the Benedryl had taken effect and the symptoms had quit progressing, but I was getting so sleepy that I couldn't do the emergency room paperwork you have to do before the nurse will take a look at you. So Mike did all the paperwork, and then the nurse talked to me, and I whispered hoarsely to the nurse, and then they put me in a room where I took a nap while I waited for the doctor to come.

Skipping over several dull details, the doctor gave me some steroid tablets to reduce the swelling in my throat, and told me not to take any more medicine until I had told the ENT what had happened.

Mike called the ENT's office for me this morning and talked to the nurse (the doc is in surgery all day on Tuesday), and she said I should quit taking the antibiotic.

So, I don't really know what happened. Was it a reaction to something I'd taken? Or to some combination of the things I was taking? Or something completely unrelated? I suppose I'll need to talk to the doctor again tomorrow when he's in his office. In the meantime, I'm going back to bed.

This recovery is taking a lot longer than I'd expected. I'm not used to being sick.