A First

For someone as "sickly" as am -- asthma, regular bronchitis, various allergies -- I managed to make it 36 3/4 years without having an I.V.

That streak ended yesterday. The sore throat I'd been nursing for some time, sure it wasn't strep -- it wasn't -- but wrongly convinced that it was a virus, turned out to be a lot more serious that I had thought.

It's never a good sign when the first doctor to see you is so wowed by the sight of your throat that he immediately calls for back-up. Or when nurses come in afterwards to have a look for themselves. Given the gravity of the consulations, I initially feared that I would be admitted to the hospital. But they gave me clindamycin -- another first! -- intravenously and administered an oral steroid.

This morning I went back for a recheck. Things look better, but I got another dose of steroids. I don't feel like getting ripped, though. The combination of a heavy dose of potent anitbiotics and the crazy-making quality of the steroids has me feeling leaden and frantic at the same time. Thank goodness for The Honourable Schoolboy. It's rapidly becoming a favorite book of mine. I'm so glad that, unlike some fast-reading friends of mine, I make slow enough progress, even in my pleasure reading, that I'm able to savor its latter stages this weekend.

Well, I'm going to go attempt to sleep while Kim and Skylar head off to the Desert Museum. They're bringing me back a vial of copper or a vial of silver, to match my vial of gold. I'm psyched.

Unaccountably

There's a long interview with our inflexible, willfully ignorant leader today in The Washington Post. The part getting the most play is deserving of the honor:

The Post: In Iraq, there's been a steady stream of surprises. We weren't welcomed as liberators, as Vice President Cheney had talked about. We haven't found the weapons of mass destruction as predicted. The postwar process hasn't gone as well as some had hoped. Why hasn't anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me, for which I'm grateful.

To reiterate my point from a little while back, the parallels to Nixon's second term provide a glimmer of hope. He had his far more dramatic "accountability" moment against George McGovern, yet ended up faced with another one before he'd served his four years. It will be very hard, given the Republicans' dominance in Congress, but I don't want to give up the hope of similar mid-term moment where Bush is concerned.

Not for the Squeamish

I wasn't going to do this, but a comment from my commonalgebra, a new LJ friend and one of my favorite students ever, inspired me to do the disgusting. The other day, you see, I tried taking pictures of my throat. I don't know why, precisely, but it felt like the right thing to do. Unfortunately, my camera was not up to the task of getting a sharp image of the back of my throat. I did, however, manage to capture what turned out to be the problem, though the spot be distant and somewhat blurry.

If you look at the picture, you'll notice that the tonsil area on the left of my uvula is both very red and obscuring the darkness between it and the uvula. That's because it was already quite swollen. Turns out, had I not gone on my I.V. and subsequent oral course of clindamycin, that the swelling could have shut off my airway completely, necessitating intubation. Rough.

Anyway, here's the picture, hidden for the sake of those who have no desire to look into the "dirtiest place in the human body," as Our Bodies Ourselves informed me as a child, as part of an effort to make it clear how clean the vagina is by comparison.

( See it and wish you hadn't. . . )

Told you it was gross!