And so, on the tenth day, I decided to go to the Emergency Room. It wasn’t just that I was bored of being sick by day 10 — although, please know, I very much was, especially given that what had seemed a slow-but-sure march toward general health got utterly derailed by a weekend relapse — but that, by the tenth day of being sick, I was feeling as if the whole “taking it easy in bed, having liquids and hoping for the best” thing wasn’t really paying dividends. At least if I went to the ER, I figured, they’d flush my system with IV fluids and probably give me some antibiotics, and that would do something.
Funny story: I got no IV fluids, nor did I get any antibiotics. I did, however, get told that because I hadn’t gone to see them within the first 48 hours of my infection, they couldn’t really do much for me, and the best I could really do would be to take it easy in bed, have some liquids, and hope for the best. The irony.
Of course, this being the US healthcare system, it’s not like this ~5 hour adventure left me with nothing; I patiently await the bill for however many hundreds (thousands?) of dollars it cost for me to sit in a room for hours and get ignored by other people doing far more important things for people in far more distress than me.
That last bit isn’t entirely sarcasm; one of the good things about going to the ER was the context that, in the grand scheme of things, I was pretty well off. There was a woman who was in such pain in the waiting room that she couldn’t stop talking to herself, just saying please please please fuck oh fuck please make it stop fuck over and over and scaring a bunch of kids in the process. (Not all kids were scared; one, with the self-righteousness of someone who’s never been told no in an appropriately scary way, declared loudly, “That woman is too loud and she should stop talking because it makes me upset and she’s cursing.”) An old couple cuddled each other the entire time they waited, both looking so afraid of the world I legitimately couldn’t tell which was actually waiting for their appointment.
As I left the ER, my hopes for anything close to a speedier finish to the sickness dashed, someone passing in the corridor grabbed me by the arm, saying, “Your eyes are glassy and very bloodshot, do you know you’re going in the wrong direction for the emergency room?” Lord save us from well-meaning good samaritans whose simple faith in modern healthcare is as strong as mine.