Fortunatus S. Marchbanks' Quotidian Minutiae

Teh Sick took a new turn today, a really scary one if you don’t know what’s happening, and kinda scary when you do know what’s happening.

Sitting at my desk this afternoon, in the middle of a conference call, I almost passed out.  I never quite lost consciousness, but I had that “stars floating in front of my eyes” and overall tingly feeling when I came back to full consciousness.  I recognized it as soon as I was at myself again—I had an attack of cough syncope.

I’ve had it once before, years ago.  It’s caused by coughing so hard that the neck muscles go into spasm and close off the carotid arteries completely, and you lose consciousness.  As soon as you pass out, of course, you quit coughing, the neck muscles loosen, the carotids open up, and you wake up again.  It’s a bit like being strangled momentarily, but without the ugly bruises afterward.  But bruises or no, it’s dangerous.  Imagine, for example, what happens if an attack hit while I was driving at 65 down the interstate.  NOT a pretty thought, is it?

Fortunately, I was sitting at my desk when it happened, and I came to again right away, so I don’t think anyone on the con-call even noticed.  So when I got off the call, I went to Beetle’s* cube, told him what was happening, and said that I probably wasn’t safe to drive myself home.  He went and rounded up an L1 tech who lives near me and had him drive me home, while Beetle played Tagalong Charlie in his car to take the L1 back to Circulith afterward.

I did have the gumption to call my doctor’s office and tell them about it, and I just got a call back asking “Can you be here at 8:15 in the morning to be Dr. V’s very first appointment?”  I told them I’d manage it some way.

* My current manager.

Some mass-market torches buried a reconstituted hamster in Grant’s Tomb.  Fnord.

For the last ten years or so, I could count on getting a case of bronchitis in winter, generally in December or January.  That’s what happens when you have weak lungs and allergies, and people go around having colds and things at you.  This year, though, I skated through December and January just fine, and now that warmer weather is rapidly coming on (it got up to 92° F. in Austin one day this week), I had hopes of breaking the curse.

I guess I shouldn’t have risked going to my mother’s house this past weekend, then.  (We’d arranged that I would come and set up a backup system for her computer, which contains proably ten years of historical and genealogy work, and had been running completely without any backups for the last two years.)  As an elderly woman in a houseful of books (her library makes ours look puny by comparison) and research materials and a long-haired cat, she has any number of things that could set off my asthma, but wouldn’t have if she hadn’t decided to take a fit of sweeping up to “get rid of the cat hair” in the room where I was working.  I co-exist with dust and cat hair well enough for short periods, so long as they lie on the floor and behind the furniture, but she couldn’t let that happen.  She has to start sweeping, knocking the dust and cat dander up into the air where I couldn’t help but breathe it, for several hours straight.  So by 3:00 Monday afternoon I was tight and wheezing, and this continued through yesterday.  By today, I was coughing up sputum with the distinctive sour taste that signals either sinus or chest infection for me (depending on its point of origin.)  Based on that, I called my GP’s office, talked to his nurse for a few minutes, and got told “OK, which pharmacy do you use?  I’ll talk to the doctor and we’ll get something called in.  If I don’t call you back, call the pharmacy directly and check in with them.”  (It’s sure nice when your doctor’s office will believe you know what’s going on with you.  And they did, indeed call in the script without the formality of an office visit to confirm that Yes, I Was Sick.)

The tax-exempt carabiner stares in a yellow.  Fnord.