Lima Friends come along for the ride.

Well since Lima Peru it's been a hard road for me. While we were there I had food poisoning twice, one of which left me with a parasite which I brought home with me.

I went to the doctor's and they put me on the Nuclear option when it comes to antibiotics for this kind of thing. It was three BIG pills a day for five days. Having done this I felt that we had defeated the bug and I could get on with life. The only problem was I kept having the effects an amoeba can give you when you have it living in your gut. It was not pleasant but I thought that maybe the antibiotics had killed all the good stuff in my stomach and that it was just taking a while for it to get better. I keep up this pretense until the day we were getting ready to go to London for New Year's Eve. I bit the bullet and went to the doctor's again. This time they put me on another antibiotic, seems depending on the bug you get tells the doctor what meds to take. One size does not fit all.

I also had a head cold which had traveled to my chest. By the time I went to the doctor's that last time it felt like it was mostly gone. I think because I had the gut infection it lowered my immune system quite a bit. After the fact I don't think it was gone at all.

The really funny thing is I had my physical during this period which was scheduled a long time ago. All the results came back and I'm healthy as a horse. Doesn't feel like it though.

So I get the new meds but decided not to take them until after I got back from London for NYE. You can't drink on these meds and god knows I was going to when I was in London. So we go to London and to make a long story short I partied like it was 1999.

Which looking back on it wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done. My poor body just couldn't keep up, especially have being compromised for a month by the parasite. I ended up getting the most god awful cough, sore throat and I lost my voice. It was one of the worst chest colds/flu I've ever had. I would cough and cough and nothing would come up, I coughed so much I thought I was going to start coughing blood. I think what happened is on NYE I smoked way too many cigarettes and burned my voice box and lungs. I've not had my voice for 12 days now. Feels like it's getting better but it's taking way too long for my impatient self.

So we get back from London and I go to the doctor's again the day I get back mainly because of my voice and the dry hacking cough I've developed. I tell him everything that's gone on and he kind just scratches his head. I don't have a fever, my limp nodes are not swollen and I don't look bad. So he puts me on a different antibiotic for chest stuff, codeine cough medicines for the cough which was quite painful and cortisone to help the voice box shrink back down to the normal size it should be. So now I'm taking an antibiotic for my gut, one for my chest, cortisone for my throat, codeine cough syrup to sooth my throat and my high blood pressure meds and high cholesterol meds. In other words I'm a fricking walking pharmacy.

Cut to six days into the treatment. I can't eat because any food in my stomach starts an uncontrollable bout of hiccups. The hiccups happened anyway but as soon as I ate they really started. I think I hiccupped day and night for about three and a half days straight. Every time I took the meds they made me feel like I was going to puke. This was horrible because I knew I was supposed to keep them down so I would just rock back and forth in bed hoping that the "I'm going to puke" feeling would go away only to puke anyway. I finally got to the point where I told Dave I was not taking them anymore and called the doctor to let him know that. He called back, asked how the parasite thing was going, I told him I thought it was done and he told me to stop taking the meds. THANK GOD!

Also, yesterday the whole left side of my face started hurting. It's kind of like having your nerves on the outside of your skin. Just brushing up against it hurts. I can also feel the tube that connects the ear to your throat for drainage. Every so often it just shoots a sharp shooting pain into my head where the middle ear is. I'm not sure that's happening there. It could be a virus that's taken advantage of my weakened immune system. I'll call the doctor later about all this.

So here I am today. My stomach is almost back to normal, I have my hunger back and I can eat without hiccupping now. I feel much better except I still have no voice. The dry hacking cough is still there and my voice can work but I'm straining it and it's still sore so I try not to use it. There is a good side to the whole thing. I've lost 22lbs and can now fit into clothes that I had given up on. But that's about the only good thing I can say about it.