Saturday, August 29, 2009

Pneumonia still sucks

So, I'm still feeling like hell due to this pneumonia. It's interesting though- when it was really bad, I just sort of became really slow-moving, and very minor tasks were more important. I don't know if it's what the Buddhists call "mindfulness", but at one point I felt very satisfied with sitting and holding a glass of water successfully for half an hour.

My doctor has been excellent, incidentally. He gave me a new prescription yesterday after reviewing my X-ray. He had apparently picked up on the infection in my left lung after listening to me breathe (it's still amazing to me that he do that), but it was larger than he thought. It's a bit weird to get pneumonia for no apparent reason in the middle of the summer at my age. He did ask if I had been drunk recently, which was amusing. Like the old saying about the French, I am almost never drunk, but rarely fully sober. No, I have not been drunk recently.

Another interesting thing to me, as a newcomer to Canadian health care (and here's the really confusing thing- you can't actually talk about the "Canadian Health Care System" because each province is a different system), is that the pharmacy asked me if I have any insurance. I do not. You don't actually think of Canadians as having private insurance, but of course they do, for things like this. The drugs are cheap (as apparently many Americans have discovered); a batch of antibiotics was about thirty bucks, so I'm not complaining anyway. But, it's not all "public". The doctor's visits, the X-rays and blood work (that I missed my appointment for!), and the prescriptions were all covered by the health card, but the antibiotics were thirty bucks. I'll live.

Anyway, I am back home and have been doing nothing but coughing, sleeping, and watching Pee Wee's Big Adventure. It's an interesting experience being sick- sort of like taking a vacation to elderly-land. But, seriously folks, I am fucking tired of coughing.

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