It has been an eventful week with the snow mostly, but for me, it was a week with a first. I woke up early Monday morning (2 am to be exact) with a dry throat. Needless to say, after my first drink, I realized that this wasn't just a dry throat. My right ear felt a little sore and the dry throat feeling just didn't go away. I figured I was getting a cold or a sinus infection, so I took a couple Tylenol and headed back to bed. By 6 o'clock in the morning, I could tell that I was going to have problems. My throat hadn't felt this sore since before I had my tonsils removed back in '95. Every time I tried to drink something, it was so hard to swallow. Still not believing that I was getting sick, I went on through the day until the afternoon. That is when Erik told me to go lay down and he would worry about the boys.
Laying down didn't really help. I laid there crying because my throat hurt so much and the rest of me was just so achy. I can tolerate a whole lot of pain. I went through all three labors of my boys without any pain medicine. But for some reason, this pain really scared me. I think that I remembered how bad it was before I finally had my tonsils removed. I was running a fever that did not come down until almost 6 o'clock. I was able to eat a little spaghetti for dinner and an ice cream sandwich later. Those were the only things that I ate that day. I didn't sleep well that night. The next day, Erik went back to work. I knew that another storm was coming later that day, so I needed to get to the doctor's. I called my mom to talk to her about my throat and she thought that it might be strep throat. I was a little bit shocked because I have never had strep throat before. I made an appointment with my doctor for later that morning while my mom watched the boys. I have had the same doctor for most of my life. He knows about my curved ear canals and my small ear drums. He looked at the throat and said that it looked bad. He didn't think that it was strep, but he still did a culture. After the culture, I waited for 5 minutes. He was quite shocked to see that it was positive. Thirty-one years old and my first case of strep! He gave me an antibiotic and told me to come back on the 22nd for a second culture to make sure the strep was gone.
It has been over 48 hours and I am finally feeling better. The one good thing about this sickness is that I haven't wanted to eat, so I have lost 5 pounds in the last couple of days. I have kind of laughed about it because I was praying last week and asked God to help me get some self-control when it came to eating so I could finally lose the last 18 pounds of baby weight. I think that sometimes He likes to do things a little differently than I would have chosen to do.
