I’m a man in my 40s with strep throat. It was diagnosed last Sunday with a throat culture, and I was prescribed a ten day course of antibiotics (now halfway done). I assume I got it from my toddler, but neither he nor my wife have had strep symptoms, though both have had off-and-on cold symptoms since early Sep.
It’s the worst sore throat I ever remember in my life. I’ve barely eaten in 5 days. The weirdest thing is that I have no fever, no weakness, no significant other symptoms at all – just a terribly painful sore throat. So painful that it’s sometimes hard to swallow water, or even nothing. I think it’s slightly improved, but I still get doubled-over with throat pain multiple times per day. I think it’d almost be better if I was weak and bedridden – at least it’d be easier to sleep.
The slight silver lining is weight loss. Almost ten pounds so far in less than a week, out of the 30-40 I’d really like to lose. But I know that when it’s gone, I’m going to be hungry, and knowing myself I can put away a few days’ worth of food in a single meal when I’m hungry enough, so I doubt the weight loss will last.
Good luck with the weight loss, and hope you feel better soon. Only once did losing weight through illness work for me in the ‘longer’ term, it broke a plateau I was trying to break for quite some time, other times it came back rather quickly.
I expect strep throat sucks just as much for kids, it’s just that we’ve either forgotten how miserable we were as kids, or kid’s pain isn’t as eloquently discussed or even dismissed.
I make hot Jello tea for my kids when they have sore throats. To make a pot, mix a pack of Jello with about six cups of hot water. I just run the water through my coffee maker and then mix the Jello into the hot water in the pot. Or, just make it by the cup by adding a little Jello powder to a cup of steaming water until it tastes nice and has a thickness to it. The Jello coats your throat and is very soothing.
There is also a tea bag called Throat Coat that is soothing.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve always heard helps with sore throat pain. That, and products like Sucrets lozenges or Chloraseptic spray that numb throat pain.
I would hope that being halfway through a course of antibiotics would mean that @iiandyiiii is feeling significantly better by now. If that’s not the case, does that mean that the antibiotics aren’t working?
Thanks for the recommendations. Hot drinks sometimes work and sometimes hurt worse, and the spray doesn’t seem to get to where the most sore spots are. The only consistent help so far are menthol lozenges, and those only help a bit.
But I’m pretty sure there is improvement - I was able to eat a full meal for breakfast, for the first time in a week, even if it was soft foods.
I only had strep once as a kid and it does indeed really suck. To me, Sucrets tasted so bad that it was worse than the sore throat. Copious use of Chloraseptic spray was great. Tilt your head back, spray a bunch in and let it slide down your throat.
Thinking about it, I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard of someone getting strep. It seems to be less common, but that could be because we don’t have kids.
Despite antibiotic-resistant bacteria being rampant, strep is still relatively easy to treat. That wasn’t the case back in the day, especially when yanking tonsils was considered a rite of passage of childhood in many circles.
Even if the infection is largely gone, it still takes a while for damaged tissues to fully heal, which may explain the persistent sore throat.
I first got strep throat and my first ear infection at about the same age. I was babysitting my friend’s sick toddler on a day when she absolutely had to be at work and I had just been laid off.
It was also the first time in my life I had to take antibiotics. This is something we avoided when I was a kid because “they” were accurately worried about me having an allergy reaction to it. Salt water gargle helped me a lot, hot liquids, etc. I wore a turtleneck shirt to bed to keep my neck warm. I’ve had ear problems since, but never another case of strep.
Oh, and the red Cloraseptic spray helped numb my throat. Luckily, I did not pass it on to anyone else in the house.
I still remember having strep throat as a kid. At least, I remember the GINORMOUS pink-and-purple pills they had me swallow.
One time, for some reason my family was out at a relatively fancy dinner while I was sick with strep throat, and brought me with them. They had me try to choke down one of those goddamn horse pills at the table, and I couldn’t do it, and I upchucked my food in horrible streaks of pink all over my area. I’m sure that did wonders for everyone’s appetite. It was the first time I’d had such a horrible attack of vomiting in public, but unfortunately not the last.
I had a really crazy experience with strep throat a few years ago. One morning I woke up with a scratchy throat, not sore, just scratchy feeling. By the end of the day it was gone and I felt fine. The next day around dinnertime I started getting a headache. It got worse and worse as the evening and night went on. I had never had a headache like it. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read or watch TV. I tried all of the pain relievers we had in the house. Nothing touched it. I just rocked back in forth in bed, moaning and whimpering. By the next afternoon, I couldn’t take it anymore. It just wouldn’t let up. I had my husband take me to urgent care. When I told the doctor that I had the worst headache I’ve ever had, she was about to send me to the ER thinking it could be meningitis. I also told her about my 8 hour long scratchy throat. Luckily, she gave me a strep test just for the heck of it. It was positive! She was baffled by it as much as I was. I had no regular strep or cold symptoms. The antibiotics worked immediately. I felt better within hours.
I am a lot better – still sore but I can eat soft foods and ice cream, and don’t spend the entire day with a lozenge in my mouth. I think my throat was torn up badly and is now healing.
I’m glad you’re getting better, and I am not sure whether to be jealous or (reverse-jealous?) of your eating ability. I too used to have that ability before the plague, when buffets were open and in person teppan-yaki Japanese food was not dangerous. But now, when I want to maximize my buffet intake, even when I am running a calorie deficit due to running and/or walking dozens of miles the previous day, my stomach will only hold so much before it tells me to stop. Sometimes when I am running a calorie deficit, I will still feel hungry even when my stomach is full!
Unfortunately, it hasn’t translated into weight loss. I can only imagine the weight gain if I had maintained my eating ability.
I don’t remember it being that bad; as a kid when my throat got sore, I’d tell my mother and off we’d go to the doctor. I remember the antibiotic injection being by FAR the worst part of the experience, and that it was generally worth it for a free day off school. Which wasn’t generally the case when I actually felt bad.
I think part of it is that as adults, we’re more prone to ignore the early signs, thinking “Eh… my throat’s a little sore. It’ll go away on its own” and then it progresses to fever and feeling like we gargled with Drano in really short order, and it takes longer to go away as well.
Linked article deals with a family who kept getting strep despite being treated - and it turned out the reservoir was the cat.
Anyway - hopefully you are feeling better soon - but if you have trouble figuring out where you caught this, look to the cat :).
My one experience with strep throat was in college - where it turned out to be the harbinger of a case of mono - not sure if they’ve ever figured out why the two happen at the same time so often. I vaguely recall that I was feeling better within a day or so of starting the antibiotics.