In which you learn what kind of mouth I have.

I broke down and bought an Oral-B Braun electric toothbrush yesterday. It was twenty bucks, and several people have told me in the past year that they really like their own electric toothbrushes.

Well, the electric toothbrush rocks.

I can’t tell you how fabulous it is for someone with my particular dental issues to have a device that not only makes brushing easy, but gets the plaque out of places regular brushing doesn’t.

Appparently there are two types of mouth: acid and base. One gets cavities, the other gets plaque and gum disease. I get the latter. My dentist actually tries to schedule me for prophy every three months because I get so much plaque that my gums try to receed away from it… which eventually would make my teeth become loose and fall out, according to the scary full-color poster at my dentist’s office.

Anyway, the electric toothbrush works so well that I can’t believe my dentist and/or hygienist hasn’t suggested one. In fact, I can’t figure out why they don’t do anything more than clean my teeth and yell at me about flossing.

I now know that a girl can buy a device for $20 that will actually make a dent in home plaque removal, and I know there are things like plaque-removing mouthwashes available… so why don’t dental professionals, the self-same people who keep telling me my teeth are going to fall out, ever suggest I purchase and utilize these plaque-killing tools?

I think next I’m going to embark on Bo’s patented baking soda-and-peroxide home whitening routine. I hereby announce the beginning of what will later (in my astonishing unauthorized biography) be dubbed my Very White Teeth Phase! Yee-haw!

In which I have cramps. (Yes, this is a gyno post.)

I liked it better when I couldn’t even tell my period was coming. Because now that I get cramps so bad they wake me up and keep me up half the night in spite of all the aspirin and yoga, I really think it sucks.

In other words, I woke up at 1:45 this morning in pain. Got an aspirin, took it. Went back to bed, couldn’t sleep. Finally slept. Woke up again at 4. Stretched, drank water, took aspirin, tried to have a good attitude, all that stupid shit, but my guts just hurt like hell anyway. I didn’t get back to sleep until dawn, which was around seven-something.

It’s nine now, and I just woke up! And guess who is actually supposed to be at work this morning?

Because having a wicked cold in May followed by strep throat in June wasn’t enough, last night I couldn’t sleep because every time I tried to lie down my head filled up with snot. I was miserable. (I don’t take decongestants because they’re too speedy, and I’d rather be congested than have a panic attack. I can’t even drink coffee without suffering six hours of lurching, thumpy arrhythmia, so pseudoephedrine is right out.)

I was totally exhausted and entirely too snotty to get any rest, not to mention the snot-slinging sneezing, so eventually I got up and tried, as a sort of science experiment, to surf for porn (a slow and miserable prospect over dial-up, believe you me) until my head drained a little and I simply could not keep my eyes open a moment longer. I finally crashed at about 3:30 AM.

All hail the Internet and the naked people thereon, that’s all I have to say.

Saturday Brett and I went out to breakfast at Country Kitchen, and then to Menard’s where he bought a grinder and I bought floor stripper and wax.

I stripped and mopped the kitchen floor all damn day. It’s so humid that it takes forever for the floor to dry, even with a fan running. I never managed to get the wax applied.

I also started to come down with another rotten cold. I’ve been sick since May. I’m pretty damned tired of it.

On top of yet another damn cold, I also have a yeast infection. This is probably more information than you want to know, but a huge portion of my awareness is fixated on HOW MUCH THIS TOTALLY SUCKS in this damn heat.

You know that joke about bleeding for a week and not dying? It gets funnier every damn month, especially when followed by a yeast infection. I literally cannot wait for menopause.

All face cephalexin, from whom all blessings flow.

I woke up Tuesday morning, some seven hours after my last post, feeling if not well than at least less sick.

Today, at 1:32 PM, I swallowed for the first time in days without pain. *snoopy dance* I am so on the way to being better!

Today I even went to town, where I bought some Fun Fur for a shrug I’m knitting and picked up some counter checks because, ha ha, I ran out of checks and needed one to pay my phone bill so I could get back online to tell y’all that strep hasn’t actually managed to kill me!

I’m also knitting my second sock, finally. (I knit my first sock over a year ago. They’re hideous, but hell, they’re socks. Who cares if they’re fugly.) Knitting and sickness go together like… like… gin and tonic!
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[Darling one, this post is not about suicide, but about a really bad bout of strep throat. If you found this page because you’re feeling suicidal, please, please, PLEASE call 1-800-SUICIDE now. They understand; you don’t have to be alone.]

I am in so much pain I very nearly can’t stand it.

I’m not exactly a wimp. I mean, I can tolerate me some hurt, people. It’s the UNRELENTING GODDAMNED CONSTANT PAIN that gets to a girl. Every time I swallow, it’s like the whole Universe has entirely dissolved and reformed itself, that’s how much it hurts. It hurts even when I’m not swallowing, which I happen to think is just in bad form all around.

It’s two in the morning! I woke myself up by swallowing – all those spectacular circling stars of horrific pain caught my attention and dragged me up from sleep by my leprous throat. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts. You would have to see the hugeness of my lymph nodes to believe them.

Neither Advil nor gargling with salt water helps.

I’ve only taken a day’s worth of antibiotics, but I have enjoyed no reduction of my symptoms what so ever. I think I’m gonna need me some horse tranquilizer-style antibiotics, because some superfuck somewhere got strep* and couldn’t be bothered to take the entire course of antibiotics prescribed, and therefore unleashed into MY WORLD a strain that’s fucking immune to cephalexin, which used to kill strep!

Fuck you, whoever you are, and I hope your tonsils have fallen out. OUT, I say. OUT!!!

*You should thank your lucky stars that I’m not even going to mention the meat industry. Antibiotics have always worked for me when I needed them, and now they don’t, and I’m in pain, and you’d better believe me when I say that I. AM. PISSED.

Doctors are ashamed of how much they charge for things.

You learn this when you’re uninsured. They say, “No insurance, right?” and you nod. And then they proceed to skip tests and prescribe the cheapest pills in their arsenals.

This is, I think, because they know they overcharge insurance companies for things like strep swabs.

In a nutshell, I was not tested for strep, but it was assumed I have strep because, and I quote, I’m “too old for mono.”

I’m to take this bottom-shelf antibiotic (only thirteen dollars!) and call in if I don’t feel better by Wednesday, because the good doctor told me he saw a guy recently whose throat looked as bad as mine and his bacteria didn’t respond to the bottom-shelf antibiotic and had to be killed with some expensive, bovine-strength antibiotic.

Lord, I’m so fucking happy. Not. (At least my sweet GP is reluctant to prescribe the bovine-strength antibiotic. A point in his favor.)

I think I have tonsillitis. Seriously.

Friday I cleaned house (did tons of laundry) and had a fairly good day. It was the first day in a whole month when I didn’t have at least one panic attack! Late in the afternoon I showered and put on my new cute dress – the one I bought at a consignment shop in Iowa City recently. (Cute dresses are fun. I want a dozen more.) I made and served dinner to my hubby when he got home from work, and he, predictably, fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV before dark.

I text messaged Hattie a few times; she was waiting at the Red Rock for Misty so they could go to see Steve’s band play in Ft. Madison. I was invited, but didn’t want to be out quite that late. I wandered around the house in my cute dress with my clean hair, listening to my husband snore and folding laundry.

By the time I went to bed, my throat was sore.

Saturday I was in HELL. Oh my GOD my throat hurt! Fuck! Swallowing was like an explosion. I ran a temperature on and off all day. I ached and everything hurt and I was in agony. My husband, who has the compassion of a fucking rock, showed me no sympathy and was kind of a jerk because I wasn’t paying him proper attention – he’s of the opinion that I’m being “lazy” when I don’t wait on him hand and foot, keep the fridge full of dead animal flesh, and make him lunch. (I’m kind of getting sick of his shit again, frankly, but that’s another post.)

He left for town without even telling me he was leaving, and he didn’t answer his phone any of the three times I called him to beg him to bring me some ibuprofin and Gatorade. He apparently thought I was just fucking off or something. I finally had to stand in front of him yesterday afternoon and say, “Hey! I’M SICK, you fucktard. My tonsils are huge, my throat hurts like hell, and I’m running a temperature.” Being who and what he is, he did not ask if I needed anything, nor did he offer any kind of help or assistance in making me comfortable. He’s a heartless twat. In fact, he went out to dinner with Joe, Misty & Steve in Mt. Hammil.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I do not expect him to stay home on a Saturday night just because I’m sick. But the decency of a simple, “Can I bring you anything?” would go a long goddamned way around here, I can tell you that much.

Today I got him to buy me some Advil (but only because he was already going to town to take Joe home), and now I can kill the pain long enough to eat and get some hydration in my body, but I’m still miserable. Miserable, I tell you. Miserable! It’s a hundred degrees out and my tonsils – which have always been unusually large to begin with – are massive, and they HURT, and swallowing feels like my head is exploding, and I have a fever so my skin and bones ache.

When you turn seven or so, your tonsils are supposed to shrink. By then you don’t need them quite so much, having already been exposed to most of Earth’s germs. Mine never shrunk. They’re pretty big. Which means that when they swell up they’re huge.

WebMD, who assumes all persons with tonsillitis are children, says,

“A sore throat along with sudden fever and swollen lymph nodes may indicate a bacterial infection. Anyone with these symptoms should see a health professional to be tested for strep throat, which requires treatment with antibiotics.

“Tonsillitis is usually caused by a virus and does not require prescription medication. Gargling with salt water and taking nonprescription pain medications (such as acetaminophen) can help manage symptoms as the body fights off the infection.”

Lovely. Either I hope for strep and therefore antibiotics, or I have to suffer through a damned virus.

I guess I’ll be going to see my sympathetic-but-disturbingly-vacuous GP tomorrow for a strep swab. You know, just in case. And I guess I’d better hit the grocery store on my way by, lest my neanderthal husband should feel the lack of snack food and dead animals in the fridge means I don’t love him… God forbid he should be required to ever cook for himself! Even when his wife has tonsillitis! OR POSSIBLY STREP, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!

Friday I saw my midwife for “well woman care”… which is alternacare-speak for a good old-fashioned pap smear and internal exam. No doubt you’ll all be stoked to hear that my cervix looks healthy, and that I have no lumpy breast tissue. And my blood pressure is great, and I appear to be generally well. (Physically. As we all know, I’m quite whacked out of my head in my old age. Squonk.)

She put me on some suppliments… DHEA, whatever the hell that is, and B6. The B6 is supposed to help with the new screwiness of my non-fertile fertility cycle; the DHEA is supposed to, I don’t know, make me feel better. I haven’t bothered to look either suppliment up yet, to be honest. Which might actually mean the DHEA is working, because normally I’d have researched the shit out of it. (By “normally,” I mean the freak I’ve turned into in these past couple of years. Pre-freak, I would have researched it when I damn well got around to it.)

I had only mild anxiety over the weekend. A few spikes here and there, but nothing terrible. It seems to be tapering off. God, I hope so. I cannot express HOW SICK I AM of feeling my heart lurch and skip beats. It gets old really fast, let me tell you, to be repeatedly kicked in the chest – from the inside – by your own laboring heart.

Why is it that when a woman tells a man she’s going to have a gyno exam, the man invariably says, “Have fun with that,” while making a weird face? Have fun with that? Have FUN with that? Okay, buddy, when you get old enough to need prostate exams, I’ll be chortling with undisguised GLEE when I encourage you to enjoy yourself at the proctologist’s!

Today it’s too chilly to lie out, which is a bummer. I figured after raining all weekend the least Nature could do is help me out with my tan. But no, apparently she wants me to clean my house instead. Bitch.

Will you still love me if I reveal that I have not bathed since last Thursday? (Please note: I haven’t gone anywhere or seen anyone since Friday, so this experiment isn’t actually hurting anyone.) I think I no longer like to bathe. In fact, I think I’ve gotten bored of it. Being oily-skinned, I spent many, many, many years of my life bathing every single solitary day – and I think I may have hit my quota. Now I just don’t want to bother. I mean, I want to be clean and smell nice, but getting in the shower seems like such a pain in the ass when there’s other stuff to do. Like take a nap.

Plus Joe was telling me the other day that some healer was telling him that Westerners bathe too much; that certain things need to be reabsorbed by the skin after exertion or excercize, and that chronic rampant bathing is actually a hazard to healthy joint function. So there.