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Monday August 24, 2009

The little tickle that could

BUT THEN AGAIN WITH MARY SCHNEIDER


To be forewarned is to be forearmed, but sometimes too much information can also be a bad thing.

IT started off as a slight tickle at the back of my throat; a tickle that just wouldn’t go away. For a whole day, I tried to cough that tickle out, but it refused to cooperate. It had taken up residence, dug its heels in and wasn’t going to be evicted so easily.

I’ve never been one to run to a doctor when I have a cold or flu, but I was desperate to get rid of the squatter in my throat. In the end, I did what I usually do when impatience gets the better of me: I searched the Internet for some relief.

One site suggested a hot drink of lemon and honey, two ingredients that I didn’t have at the time. Then I stumbled across an interesting cure on another site that I just had to try out: “When the nerves in the ear are stimulated, it creates a reflex in the throat that can cause a muscle spasm,” says the president of an ear, nose, and throat speciality centre. “This spasm relieves the tickle.”

I stimulated my ears by inserting my little fingers into them and applying the same ear-clearing motion that many of us adopt when our ears are waterlogged. Although I did this for quite a while, there was no corresponding spasm in my throat, only that annoying tickle.

The next morning, I awoke with a scratchy sense of dread. All day, I tried to ignore it, but come evening, I was comatose on the sofa. The tickle had invited some friends to stay: the fever and the chills.

“It’s probably just the unpredictable weather,” I said to myself. “Or the haze. Or the onset of A(H1N1) flu.”

Paranoia drove me back to the Internet, where I searched for symptoms of the virus. To be forewarned is to be forearmed, I told myself. However, too much information can also be a bad thing. And when I found myself reading H1N1 fatality statistics from around the globe, I knew it was time to switch off my computer. I popped a few Panadol, went to bed and hoped that I’d wake in the morning.

The following morning, long before my alarm was due to go off, I awoke with congested lungs. I called a friend.

“What if it’s the onset of pneumonia,” I said.

“You don’t sound as if you have pneumonia,” she said, showing none of the sympathy that I’d been expecting. “If you had pneumonia, surely you would have problems breathing and your voice would be a bit raspy.”

For the rest of the day, I focussed on my work and tried not to think about my physical discomfort.

Still, it’s difficult to be positive when you are coughing and spluttering all over your computer screen.

That night, my congested lungs were still giving me concern. So I donned a face mask and went to my local 24-hour clinic, thinking there wouldn’t be many people out at that late hour. As soon as I entered the clinic, though, I stopped and took in the sea of people waiting to see the doctor. The number of mask-less people who were coughing and propelling all manner of bacteria and viruses into the air gave me cause for alarm.

“If you don’t already have the H1N1 flu, you’re bound to catch it in here,” said a little voice in my head, as I stood in the doorway listening to people barking and wheezing. “You should just get the hell out of here and come back at three in the morning.”

At the same time, another little voice was telling me not to be so paranoid. All I had to do was stop breathing and take a seat at the far end of the waiting room.

I found a seat that no one else was interested in (next to the toilet) and settled down to wait for my turn. Then I started to cough, uncontrollably. Everyone in the waiting room, the other coughers included, turned and looked at me with a collective expression of alarm.

Even if someone had wanted to use the toilet that night, they would have been too scared to walk within one metre of me.

When I finally saw the doctor, he asked a few questions, listened to my congested lungs, examined my red throat and sent me home with a bagful of drugs.

I’m hoping to evict that tickle real soon.

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