A week or so ago I went to the Clinic across the street due to what I thought was an ear infection. After spending a few minutes with the doctor, he prescribed a popular prescription allergy medication. I was a bit annoyed, as I was certain that my need fulfillment lay in the land of antibiotics. Of course I’ve heard that use of antibiotics is to be our downfall as a species, along with the thousands of other practices which will also be our downfall, but I don’t really care about that. I only use antibiotics every three years or so, and so I don’t think that I’ll become the vector point for the destruction of mankind. And as for my own downfall, I’ve long since come to assume that I will be the instrument of my own destruction, and as that instrument, I’ve played much scarier tunes at times.
So I took the allergy medication for a couple of days, feeling pretty shitty each day. I went back to the clinic and visited another doctor. I recounted my tale of woe, and restated my plea for penicillin. The doctor checked me out, and said he saw no signs of infection. Just to be on the safe side though, he set me up with an x-ray of my sinuses. As I sat on the stool with my face pressed against the negative holder, I thought to myself, “wow, it’s like I’m about to make a thousand cell phone calls all at once”. After getting my pic snapped, I went back to the examination room and used the time waiting to see if I could feel any brain tumors developing from the roentgenic onslaught of a few minutes earlier. The doctor soon returned, and I was a bit disappointed that he didn’t bring the x-ray with him. I imagined that it would be my only opportunity to see myself sporting a screaming-skull type visage, but I reckon if you’ve seen one screaming skull, you’ve seen them all, so I chose not to ask.
The doctor said that I had great looking sinuses. I thought, “well, perhaps he’s trying to build my self-esteem around my inner nasal appearance, or maybe he’s just shit-scared to prescribe antibiotics due to the aforementioned destruction of the species”. Anyway, he then took a throat culture, (and I have to say at this point that doctors do get to make the strangest requests of people such as poking one with sharp things in order to gauge one’s reaction, or in the case of my current office visit, stick a baton sized q-tip down one’s throat in order presumably to take a culture for testing, but I secretly suspect that it’s actually in order to see whether Linda Lovelace and others with similar talents are anomalous or more commonplace than is usually assumed.) Promising to get back to me on whether or not I would make a swell deep-throating movie star, (which would cause me no small professional quandary, as I would need to change, or at least overlook, my sexual preference), he than proceeded to prescribe Flonase, an inhaler spray filled with cortisone.
I asked him “Isn’t cortisone a steroid?” and he said that indeed it was, but that I should have no issue with it, as it would be applied topically, rather than internally, though usually I tend to think of the inside of my nose as internal. Now, I don’t really know much about steroids, as I tend to get my news much like most folks, that is, peripherally overheard with only the more gruesome and/or prurient aspects sticking in one’s psyche, and the little bit I’ve heard about steroids concerned having a back covered with acne and the future certainty of one’s johnson shriveling up like a raisin only to eventually relenquish it’s place of normalcy, and to roll out of the bottom of one’s trouser leg as one is walking into the local coffee shop on a warm, sunny morning. The doctor assured me that johnson loss wasn’t a possibility from the treatment being prescribed, and so I reacted the way I usually do when confronted with hitherto untried drugs. “Sign me up, doc.”
He told me more about cortisone which was actually pretty interesting. Prior to the inhalers, people took shots of cortisone, and there were indeed some interesting side effects at times, the most impressive to me being that about 1 in every 10,000 receiving the shots went psychotic, according to the good doctor. The doctor also stated that he used to get the shots, and now he just used the Flonase. It gave me pause for a moment to consider the slim possibility that he was one of the few who had gone psychotic.
After bidding him adieu, (and feeling disappointed that I had received no antibiotics), I walked next door to the pharmacy to get the Flonase prescription filled. The pharmacist said “this stuff is great!”, and his assistant piped up and said “I love it! It works so well!” It struck me as curious that everyone I was encountering was squirting this stuff up their nose every day, and I had to wonder if I was entering into some massive, underground Flonasian cult, hell bent on eventually taking over the world by enslaving all the “sneezers”. If so, I’m glad that I joined early enough in order to become an evil overlord, or at least a trustworthy minion, bent on carrying out the orders of the snot-free ubermeisters.
So taking both the firstly precribed medicine and the Flonase, (my new God), I spent two days feeling like I had a big medicine head, but then that feeling went away, along with any signs of what I assumed was an infection. So now, step four in my morning ablutions is to suck and huff, these being the two seperate physical maneuvers necessary to fix myself up for the day. Considering my abuse of drugs in my younger years, I may as well be Billy Graham now. But I’m still keeping an eye on my dick.