At a elderly gentleman's 100th birthday party, surrounded by 4 generations of descendants, his young great-grandson asked: "Pop-Pop, what's the secret to a long life?"
The gentleman reflected on this question for a moment and then answered: "Avoid doctors!"
LOL! You know... when I was younger, one thing that drove me a bit nuts about old people was how they could spend literally hours talking about the things wrong with them. Trading sick stories was like vets trading war stories. Well, now that I'm a bit older... paybacks!
Over the last month, I started wondering if I had sleep apnea. I wake up a LOT every night, and then have trouble getting back to sleep. Sometimes, I notice it's because I'm actually choking... that is, I stop breathing, and wake up feeling like I CAN'T breathe. This scares me, and then I end up playing on the computer for a while instead of going back to sleep. I'm always tired lately.
So 2 weeks ago, I go to an ENT. I tell him all my woes, and he asks a nurse to bring in that exam cart with a tube/camera thingie. It's this skinny probe with a camera/light at the tip, that you shove up someone's nose and it goes down their
throat, and you can see their vocal cords on the little TV monitor. The nurse goes into ANOTHER PATIENT's room, and gets the machine. I didn't think anything of it at the time. Once the machine was in the room, the Doctor explains the process: "I'm going to shove this up your nose, but I'll numb your nose with THIS stuff first", then waves a can of 'this stuff' at me, distracting me from machine. The doctor sprays 'this stuff' up my nose, and while I'm gagging and dribbling stuff out of my nose, WIPES A GAUZE PAD over the tube, and SHOVES IT UP MY NOSE!
At this point, I'm trying not to gag as the TV monitor shows the tube moving down my
throat, completely forgetting that all he did was wipe said tube with a gauze pad and nothing else. Then, he says, I don't see a problem, and yanks tube out of my nose, placing said tube RIGHT BACK IN SAME SPOT on the cart... uh... without sterilizing it.... ready for the next patient. .... As he's talking, I'm still coughing and gagging from the probe to notice what he said, or the condition of the probe.
I didn't think much of it at the time, and it wasn't til I got home that I started noticing that the back of my throat had that itching feeling you get when you are starting to get a cold. I don't want a cold, so I do what I've done before... I swabbed out my nose with qtips dipped in alcohol hand sanitizer (yes, this usually works)... but I can't reach the back of my throat where the probe was.
This back of the throat itching tickling feeling incubates a week... and then suddenly, instead of waking up not able to breath, I'm waking up coughing and hacking... with nothing coming up. Dry hacking and coughing. Then I start getting feverish. Well, I'm NOT going back to him, so I go to my regular doctor Monday... who says I have strep throat. So now I'm on Augmentin. And hydrocodone cough syrup. The augmentin gives me a tummy ach, the hydrocodone is making me loopy.
Maybe I should sue him?
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