My Annual Cough

This is my last week of comparative luxury.  The seasonal job at Columbus State Community College's bookstore begins Monday evening at 5:30, so from then until the 31st, 13-hour workdays will be the norm and not the exception.  I should probably savor what free time I have, but it's hard to when my cough has come back, making its presence known whenever I take a deep breath.

The vernal equinox is the 20th, and I had been hoping that I would be spared the cough this year, but no such luck.  It started off as a mild tickling in the back of my throat, and now there's a constant urge to cough nestled at the base of my tongue.  All I have to do is breathe normally and that'll trigger it.

Susie and I are in the same boat, ear-wise, unfortunately.  She developed an earache that goes down the whole side of her face and even into her tooth.  Nevertheless, she took some ibuprofen and gave a splendid performance in Annie, Jr. tonight at Dominion Middle School.  (I didn't go, because I was supposed to be at a late doctor's appointment.  His office called to reschedule just as I was leaving work this afternoon.  But I'll be there tomorrow night at 7 p.m. sharp.  Take note, those of you in the Columbus area!)  She went to bed tonight with some NyQuil, and hopefully that'll clear it up.

On Monday, I leave work at 11 a.m. for an appointment with an otolaryngologist (ear, nose, and throat guy) at OSU Medical Center.  Since before Christmas, I've had a non-stop rushing and ringing sound in my ears.  It feels like your ears do after someone has come up behind you and boxed them.  I was a little worried when the office called to reschedule, because they wanted an audiologist there, as well as the physician.

I complained to a friend of mine that I had such a backlog of work, I needed a periscope to see over everything.  I admit that sometime soon I'll have to make an effort to clean up the papers that scatter my desk, but I'm actually spending most of my work hours transcribing, which means I haven't had time to sort through what belongs there and what I should discard.  One of my un-favorite doctors dominated today's work.  He dictates very rapidly, occasionally gasping for breath between paragraphs, and I have to take down what he's saying, sort out his run-on sentences, and pause to look at various medical references (both online and in books) to make sure he said what he said.  I keep thinking to myself, For Christ's sake, you're a physician, not an auctioneer.


Some people have said I'm a little anal-retentive when it comes to transcribing the doctors' reports, but this is one profession where it is a must, or should be a must.  So many medical terms sound alike ("atraumatic," as opposed to "it was a traumatic event"), as do the names of many medications, that if I'm not 100% sure, I stop the recording and look up the term or drug name in question.  This is because someone's health is at stake whenever you transcribe a report.  It's not like a data entry job at Victoria's Secret, where the worst that can happen is that a package addressed to Logan, Ohio may end up in Logan, Utah.

After about a week of going without, I have a cell phone yet again.  My LG cell phone fizzled unexpectedly Wednesday night.  I spent over an hour on the phone with Net10's customer service people the next day (not including the time on hold--you can listen to most of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen during that), and finally they agreed to send me a new phone free of charge, and FedEx delivered a new Motorola cell phone, complete with camera, this morning.  I had to go to my email account and send a mass message to friends who have called me.  (I stored most of their numbers in the phone, and when the phone went belly-up, the memory was kaput as well.)


While Susie was onstage and Steph was in the audience tonight, I did something which probably helped neither my cough nor my ears.  They had eaten dinner before I came home (since they thought--as I did--that I wouldn't be home), so I went out in the cold rain (temperature in the mid-30s tonight) and went to Wendy's and brought back two Double Stacks for dinner.

More doctors' reports await me when I walk into the office at 8 a.m.  They're from a psychologist, so at least it'll be interesting.  They're long, but I always seem to whiz through psychological and psychiatric examinations.  Hearing about people's backgrounds and family upbringings is more interesting than hearing about their spines and their problems walking.  (One claimant had a condition you'll find most often in spelling bees: trichotillomania, a compulsion to pull out your own hair.)