"How I Spent My Weekend," or, "It's the Anthrax, Charlie Brown!"

So Saturday morning I had my Police Officer recert test (which is to say, my cop certification is expiring and I needed to re-test for it). I woke up Saturday morning, couldn't breathe to speak of, and cursed foully under the breath I didn't have. So I ditched the recert test in favour of going to the emergency room.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This all started when I developed a terrible, persistent cough several days (nigh on two weeks, probably) ago. "Nasty cold," I thought to myself. I later upgraded that diagnosis to "nasty case of the flu" after it became yet more persistent and raucous and started growing some nausea. Then at play rehearsal Friday night (more about the play later), I was informed that our female lead wasn't going to be there because she had gone to the hospital for whooping cough.

Whooping cough. Everyone sort of stares at me uncomfortably and wonders how many actors we'll be missing when we open the next day. I go home, look up whooping cough on the INTARWEB, and say to myself "self, that's what you done got." My wife panicks because she's certain I have SARS, which her boss insists is the plague that will wipe out humanity. I explain, not for what will the last time over the next few days, that the symptoms I have don't match SARS.

So that gets us up to Saturday morning, when I collapsed of coughing fits and inability to breathe. So I check myself into the ER (I can't wait for the bill), and the triage nurse asks me a bunch of questions, leading off with the inevitable "have you been to China or Canada lately?" I explain, not for the last time, that I don't have freaking SARS. The non-triage nurse runs me through the battery of tests (blood pressure, blood oxygen, pluse, et peter cetera) and starts filling out her paperwork while the testing machine beeps incessantly. I explain, not for the last time, all about my lack of SARS. Then she looks up and says she should turn off the beeping machine before it alarms the whole building. Why?

It says I'm dead.

And, on that promising note, I head off to see the doctor.

The doctor runs me through a bunch of routine stuff, including asking me to explain to her that I do not, in fact, have SARS, and then gives me the test for Pertussis (the fancy-pants name for whooping cough). The test, she tells me, will be back in a few weeks. Fat lot of good that will do me, since I'd know anyhow by then (whooping cough becomes much more severe and distinctive after the second week or so). So she says she isn't sure it's whooping cough, but, to be safe, she and the other doctor both agree that I should take the antibiotics for it. So she writes me a perscription for two thousand milligrams of Erythromycin daily. For ten days.

In case you're not familiar with Erythromycin, it's the single most powerful Weapon of Mass Destruction known to man or Saddam Hussein. If you're talking chemical weapons, this is it. The purpose of this drug is to kill everything in sight, and eventually it gets the right infection and everything's all better. If you live through it. To put things in perspective, the other of our cast who has whooping cough was put on 500mg daily of an amoxicillin derivative. I'm taking four times as much of a drug that could theoretically be used to treat a person infected with Godzilla. Dr. Patton, at your service.

So with both of us thoroughly hosed-down with antibiotics, the show went off well enough. I go into work the next day (bringing us up to the present) and exlpain to the management what's going on. The I explain to them repeatedly that, no, it isn't SARS.

I guess my whole point is that SARS pisses me off.