So, about two weeks back, I came down with a sore throat. Pretty painful one, but it’s not rare for post-nasal stuff to irritate a throat. I assumed that I was coming down with a cold transmitted to us by a child, and groaned as I prepared to fight it off.

As Yoda might say, off it did not fight. Which is bad, because I don’t like going to doctors. At all. There’s a long list of things I despise about the experience, highest on that list being that I don’t really have much natural faith that they’ll do anything to improve my situation–but that they will collect what I think is an exorbitant fee, subject me to an indifferent receptionist, and almost certainly try to push some drugs on me. Around here, that’s mostly what people want–“just give me the pills and I’ll go away.” My own preference is for understanding my condition and what it means, which is not the doctors’ preference. I’m convinced that half the time it’s because they don’t actually know what’s wrong, and the other half, they don’t think it’s a good use of their time to explain it to me.

Pretty soon I couldn’t sleep lying down. Then I couldn’t sleep sitting up. The Tylenol throat stuff, which at first had made it stop hurting, stopped working. Then came pressure on the eardrums. I got to the point where I was ready to surrender and take anything that a reasonably qualified doctor said would make it stop killing me. To give you an idea how bad it was, I even accepted pain medication. I like pain medication even less than I like most other medication.

My self-diagnosis (intense post-nasal drip irritating my throat to the point where I was swallowing too often and perpetuating my problem) was well off base. I started to realize that I’d probably mis-diagnosed myself when I realized I didn’t have any congestion in my nose–just a terrible sore throat accompanied by a horrible dry cough. Turns out it was a fairly heavy duty throat, sinus and ear infection, so the doctor put me on antibiotics about the size of nuclear submarines.

Now we’re to the last gasp phase of it, where the infection rallies its legions and prepares for Bacteria’s Last Stand, but this is one situation where it was fine to just let the doctor tell me it was a mass infection and eat whatever drugs he said to eat. So sick of coughing.