Dear reader, if you are in any way like me it means that you have super powers. At least in the sense that you do believe you have ’em. ‘Cause I do. And that’s why it always takes so long before I come around to acknowledge that I’m down with a flu. Every year. This time around the round of flu was barely noticeable, I was just generally grumpy and effin’ exchausted. This Monday I was so exhausted the only reason I had for getting out of bed was to send in my hours to accounting. Get rich or die tryin’. Then I went home and watched TV, which was completely exhausting.
On Tuesday otitis broke out. If you haven’t experienced it you will, apart from being a lucky lucky bastard, not know the deafening roar of pain otitis can be. And if you haven’t had it as an adult yet it can also be very serious. 
Luckily I had it as a child, even though I almost chewed off my left arm to relieve the pain. It’s like your head is completely sealed up, like a spacecraft, but with the growing vacuum forces on the inside. Imagine a motivational poster saying Otitis: It’s like an inverted spacecraft of your head and although a very true motivational poster it wouldn’t be very motivational.
The pain never ceases, it grows, everything you do or somebody else does seem to worsen it, until you’re nothing but a sniveling heap on the floor whimpering from the agony. Like I said, I’ve had it as a child so I know how the situation will develop, but a friend of mine got it first time at the age of twenty and his folks had to physically hold him down so that he wouldn’t pierce the eardrum with a knife. The pressure inside your head is so elevated that the eardrum is bulging inside your ear. It can bulge to the point where it snaps. Which is what happened to me two years ago.
That time I endured an even tougher more hell with my otitis. Lying in my home – a shabby bedsit – at the time and not knowing where to put my body or how to sleep without waking up every ten minutes from the pain, until the eardrum finally snapped and some icky fluid started running from my ear. It wasn’t blood, and it immediately relieved me from the pressure and the pain. It’s the price you get for not playing with the cutlery. Or seeing a doctor earlier on. (But they will tell you you have to wait it out anyway.)
So this year the eardrum snapped on Day Two, which came as a pleasant surprise relatively speaking. From the quivering and driveling fool the pain had rendered me, I was returned to a more or less normal state of high fever, minus any hearing in the right ear. I arranged an appointment with my doctor the following day and waited it out with Lady C, and the Firefly DVDs my brother gave us for X-mas. I got to the doctor’s office and at first he told me to simply wait it out. The body will usually sort itself out after the pus from the middle ear has drained. I suspect my doctor reads wikipedia too. But as a standard measure I had to sit and wait for a blood test.
Cue a raise in fever and a nurse that never gets off the phone and you’re set for an entertaining evening. She was taking phone calls from other patients, no doubt, but why on Earth did they have to talk about the nurse’s recent loss of her father? To several of the callers? Your father is dead, but I’m still salvageable sitting right here!
It came to a point where I began to wonder if she was aware of my presence at all, and started coughing for attention. Which caused a real coughing craze and a hurl of pain to my ears. Naturally, taking blood samples was not her specialty, and she giggled along while I withered away. I was shown back in the waiting room to wait for the results.
A couple of hours later they woke me up to apologize that they’d forgotten all about me still sitting there. The sample was unmistakeably high, a solid 80 where 8 is the natural norm and 300 your doom. So I got what I came for: penicillin! The David Hasselhoff equivalent of moldy bread.
And then I headed back home again, with more catchin-up to do with regards to the DVD collection. And that’s where I’m at today. It’s almost been a week and my hearing is still 50%, while my right ear is ceaselessly pounding annoying echoes at my teared eardrum. Which hurts.
The only reason I’m still alive is my brilliant Lady C who is a great cook and nurse. I mean, there are no one else I would rather whimper and moan in front of or shower in pus and snot than her. And it helps to have a DVD player that plays anything yo mama wants in addition to a fast and instant access to ThePirateBay. But I’m not convinced. Being ill is still not recommended. Having written this short post I feel the need to sleep for two hours. The world seems to jump from freezing to blazing hot in an instant, and whenever I feel I’m getting better, I don’t. Whenever there’s a sound on my right hand side it hurts like hell. Whenever there isn’t I hear my internal organs’ sounds. And since this seems to be going on every two year, I’ll just have to get used to it because I’m prone to. So you think about me the next time you think about the children. And just leave me the remote.
Get well soon!
Cheers, mate!