Thursday 18 May, 2006 at 10:11:00 pm
filed under personal
Having determined that we are unable to deal with my cough using regular means, the doctors have loaned me a new and exciting piece of machinery to combat my illness: the nebulizer. The nebulizer is a little blue tube that hooks up to an air compressor and spits out a thick cloud of asthma-fighting smoke. Additionally, they have nearly tripled my dosage on the other inhaler, and have ordered me back first thing tomorrow morning. Lucky me.
If I have to spend another week out of the water I think I may go insane. I have nothing to do with my excess energy, and nowhere to go after school except directly home to read and mess around on the computer. I haven’t even spoken to the coaches to let them know where I went, and I’ll have at least a month of recovery before I’m back where I was before this happened.
Still, I find something really interesting about sitting there, breathing medicine and compressed air out of the machine rattling away on my desk. Having a physical connection to the compresser has really made me think how empowered, and yet limited we are by the technology we create. It’s extremely unlikely that this cough would kill me, even without medicine. By downing codine-laced cough syrup to sleep better and hooking myself up to this box to make the cough go away faster, am I really doing myself a favor? For the most part, things like dialysis and cancer treatments do amazing things for people who would have otherwise life-threatening diseases. For myself, though, I have to wonder: Four doctor’s visits, two inhalers and a bottle and a half of cough syrup later, I’m still sick - am I really better off than when I started?
The answer is probably yes, but it’s interesting to think about.
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