I love being diagnosed with strep throat. That isn’t to say that it’s my most favorite thing in the world. But when you’re plagued with an aching sore throat with no remedy, a verdict of Streptococcus seems like the only light at the end of the tunnel.
My husband was ‘sick’ with a scratchy throat over the weekend. When my throat started bothering me the following Sunday night, I thought I’d caught whatever he had. As he left Monday morning, he called out to me “just rest, don’t do any work around the house while you’re sick”, a way to get himself off the hook for not folding any laundry while he was home sick, the day before.
I made a doctor’s appointment later that day, for the required ‘sick note’, and just a check up. I didn’t think that the sore throat would turn into anything more than a bad cold. While driving there, I received a call from an unknown number, and didn’t check the message until I was parking in the underground parking lot. “Hello, this is the Dr’s office. She won’t be able to make your appointment in 15 minutes.” To say I was extremely disappointed in the inept medical system, falls short of the reaction I had. I begrudgingly returned home, assuming that, in any case, I would feel better the next day.
I woke up that night with an excruciating lump in my throat, and I knew that this was far from over. My throat hurt so much, reminding me of my brief bout with mono two years ago. The next day, I tried everything, and I mean everything: hot water with lemon and honey, whiskey, ginger, sprays, pills -- the whole works. I went back to the doctor, who took a quick look and said “it looks like some sort of virus -- how many sick days from work do you need?”
Over the next two days, I drank more hot water with things floating in it than I ever have before. I polled people for any home remedies they knew, and tried some pretty crazy ones.
I finally decided that enough was enough, and I went back to the doctor yet again. I dragged my husband with me this time, for moral support. We came without an appointment, and I felt fine with that, seeing as she had stood me up once, and completely misdiagnosed me the second time, all in one week.
My husband teased me that it was people like me that held up upstanding people who come in waiting for real appointments. I said that we would be quick, in and out, and that we would hardly waste people’s time. Which is why I was so surprised when we finally went into the doctor’s office, and it was my husband who was chit-chatting with the doctor. It started about how his immune system is so much stronger than mine, because he exposes it to everything. This got the doctor rolling -- she really loves to chit-chat with other English speakers -- and the discussion evolved to lactose intolerance and a conference that she’d been at, the day before. This of course evoked my husband’s pride at his claim of being able to ‘overcome’ his lactose intolerance when he first came to Israel, some 9 years ago. Let’s just say, it was not I who held up the other patients.
When she came around to checking my throat, she said “oh, yeah -- it may be strep throat! Sometimes strep throat can be detected by little white dots in your throat, and other times, your throat looks normal”. She diagnosed me with strep, wrote me a referral to the lab for a throat swab, and a prescription for much-needed antibiotics.
She joked with my husband about my being overly-conscientious with regard to feeling bad about missing so much work. And as she wrote out a new doctor’s note, she said -- “you know, I always wonder why there’s no word for conscientious in Hebrew” -- and I thought to myself -- looking back over the events of the past few days -- that it’s really no wonder at all.
