sick

A doctor a day keeps the ....

Finally met a doctor who actually saw my condition for what it was! He did a thorough inspection and said "Yes. Your sinus is infected and you need antibiotics!"

I thought to myself "there we go again.. possibly going to give me the same old amoxycilling and shoo me away"

He did prescribe a stronger dose of Amoxycillin than the usual 500mg but surprised me by saying "you have been regularly sick this year according to your medical records! That is highly unusual"

My jaw dropped. He actually READ my medical records! A Doctor. In the US of A! He read "my" medical records!

Then he went on to order a CT scan!

By now I am already thinking, I have died and passed on to out-patient heaven and have visions of Chitraguptan counting the number of swear words on my blog before deciding my fate.

This doctor, was also nice enough to call me within a few hours after the scan and give me a thorough analysis of my situation. Why I am falling sick so often? why the standard Amoxycillin will not help? and What else is required from me as a personal committment to make sure I do not fall sick again? etc. etc.

Unlike the other stet. wearing dudes and dudettes, this guy did not tell me to embrace yoga, eat healthy, have less stress, etc. etc..Everytime I hear that lecture, feel like hitting the doc. with some blunt instrument.

If you work to make ends meet, share responsibilities in raising kids, fill up your minivan at the local costco once a week, and are a south Indian dude with strong tastebuds and a penchant for deep fried stuff, it is not possible to do yoga, eat healthy and have less stress!

Finally this doctor said something that cracked me up.

"I am going to prescribe a medication for you. This will definitely help your condition immediately. But it is a steroid and you need to take it early in the morning after breakfast. The reason I am cautioning you is that it might make you a little hyper!"

How can I get any more hyper-er?

My faith in the American medical system is a tad restored. I stand corrected after all these years. There are some real doctors here! No, you are not stealing him from me.. I am keeping this dude a secret! He is now my "primary" physician! he he he..

Now he is indirectly forcing me to:

1. get up early in the morning
2. eat breakfast

who knows, maybe he is just giving me "balli mittai" and this is a ploy to get me to sleep early, wake up early and eat breakfast?!

In any case, the pills start now!

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The potpourri that is life

Last wednesday saw a turning point in Daddy's life. He had written posts the previous weekend on how he was determined to change his lifestyle and life, take better care of himself, blah, blah, blah, blah, and more blah.

San even took a secret photo of him meditating in the backyard(which he found out much later while downloading all photos from the camera).



If this trend continues, people will start to think twice before they come visit us. Looks like everyone in the house has started taking secret pictures!

Just when things were going great, the little one came back with a small but stern cough. As is customary in this house, when kids are sick, they sleep on daddy's side with his left hand for a pillow and when they are in extreme distress they call out "Daddy!!!!", preferably after 3:00AM but precisely before 4:00AM and just as he looks at them and says "Ennada kuttyma?" let out a bellowing cough and directly trasfer spittle into his open mouth!

Daddy, who has somehow managed to get a Ph.D., is an evolutional retard. After going through this repeatedly with two kids over five years, he still has not figured out that, this whole sleeping with the sick kid is a bad idea. He just does not learn!

That fateful cough, coincided with Saturn moving to the ninth place in daddy's horoscope and at precisely 3:58AM the flag of the invaders was planted on Summit Daddy and when the sun rose the next morning, it was fluttering for all the world to see. The next few days were a blur. Daddy had been taken siege.

Did I mention the Saturn moving around to wrong places on the planetary belt, as predicted by famous astrologers? Apparently, Mr. Saturn can do a lot of bad things according to Hindu astrology, and as predicted, daddy's future took another nosedive. Almost ten years after marriage, he decided to have an affair!

Yes. We all know San is a stunner and daddy loves her very much. But as fate would have it, he was physically weak and mentally drained and in a moment of total weakness he succumbed to someone he met at the doctors office.

Her name was Codeine Robitussen and she was one sleeping beauty! She took him places he had never been to before and even locations which daddy had seen only with his dear wife appeared in a new light. Dad thought he had found the elixir of life!

The good news was that the affair ended three days later when the mother in law returned from India. She took one look at daddy at the airport, saw his clothes and said "You are a bloodly rag! and I am going to fix this for good." It was just daddy and the MIL driving back from the airport for almost an hour, with the MIL lecturing a quiet daddy on his habits and how her poor daughter deserved better. The MIL, had "Had enough!".

They came back from the airport, MIL's bags were unpacked, and they had enough material to open a small south Indian provision/sweets/savories store in Cupertino. Daddy had already broken up with the exotic Codeine and to celebrate, the MIL offered him and San sweets and savories. Daddy, tried small samples of every little item, only to find that they all tasted like "arisi maavu" aka "rice flour"! Had he been a carnivore he probably would have declared that they all tasted like "chicken"! This was a disaster. Dad had lost his sense of smell, sound, taste, needed windshield wipers for his watering eyes and was pretty much in suspended animation.

Then a miracle happened. He met the right doctor who gave him the right medicine. In the great country of United States, the probability of finding the right doctor is 1 in 10 and the probability of that doctor giving the right medicine is 1 in 10. The nine out of ten times you get that kid out of college looking up your nose and patting down your throat, you can bet your copay that you are going to walk home with stuff that will make you regret the attempt to seek medical help. That said, the chances of getting a screwed up prescription is very high and the calculation of that conditional probability will be left as a homework exercise for the reader.

Sorry, I forgot, this blog is not a math textbook! Let's get back to Daddy and his miracle. The last twenty four hours have seen daddy get back his sight, speech, smell and most importantly his sense of taste! Based on his recent self tests he concludes that :

Seedai tastes like seedai,
Murukku tastes like Murukku,
Karasevai tastes like karasevai, just as he expected!
Mixture tastes like Mixture,
Varuval tastes like varuval and surprisingly,
Sohan papdi tastes like Heaven!

Now that daddy successfully made it to work today, can talk again albeit with a slight cough and a raspy voice, even play with the kids and more importantly devour Sohan papdi like nobody's business...

We are one happy family again!


ps. This has definitly been daddys worse sickness in ten years and he has a newfound appreciation for family, life, love and all that he should appreciate more. He seriously believes he saw Yama driving a Sohan Papdi vandi with the big glass jar all empty, trying to aim his lasso to grab daddy into an empty tasteless world.

pps. We are not talking the Sohan burfis here. We are talking fresh off the bell jar, mouth watering, raw cotton!

pps. He also thinks Codeine Robitussen was one bad @$$ girl and he is better off without her bad influence!

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A time and place for everything

7:30 AM Friday Morning

Daddy and Mommy are in the kitchen, striping off their clothes like there is no tomorrow!

Daddy curls up all the clothes on the floor, into a big ball and throws it in one corner.

Mommy bends down to reach something on the floor and dad gives mom a quick glance. They make eye contact. Dad, who is very good at reading moms eyes, realizes instantly that he has forgotten something....

Still in his underwear, he rushes back to the cabinet and quickly grabs a...

CUT... CUT.. CUT..

He rushes back to the cabinet and quickly grabs a .....kid that has just finished throwing up all over daddy and mommy, from the kitchen countertop!!

Yep. Truth is so far from fiction. Even the present is so far from the past!

Flashback to three days ago!

The little one decided to taste the pacifier from a sick baby in her daycare and came home with a stomach bug. As is customary, she will only ask for Daddy when she feels insecure. That means sleeping on daddy's shoulder all through the night, including when she is throwing up.

Lets just say, we ran out of sheets to replace. Now daddy is sick as well, thanks to taking four baths a day, no sleep, laundry chores at 1AM, 3AM, 5AM, 7AM. That means mommy is under extra pressure as the only healthy person in the house and Jr. is moping because she cannot come near her sister or daddy! The whole house has a gloomy feel to it at times.

Now back to that scene in the morning! Daddy did a fantastic save in the living room that would have made Jonty Rhodes proud! In one smooth motion, he swooped down the little one, who had just given her warning cough, grabbed her and raced to the kitchen. His clothes were gone, but he managed to save the living room carpet!!

He screamed for reinforcement and mommy showed up to clean the baby. She did not know that the little one had more in store for her, than she had for daddy and was in trouble as well.

===== We interrupt this post for an short break =====

As irony would have it, Daddy was about to write, "well the little one has stopped throwing up since evening and daddy might get some sleep after all" when she did the warning cough again!

A fumble by daddy this time, who in the process of extricating the kid from the bunk bed, bumped her head pretty badly. Daddy did not stand a chance. Deciding that cloth is easier to clean than hardwood, he opted for, yet another midnight laundry session.

Ladies and gentlemen, the saga continues.....

Someday, I will write a book about "Dealing with stomach flu. What the doctors don't tell you, your parents don't teach you, and your kids won't care if you do not know!"

For now, I am going back to bed for a precious few hours so we can get ready for the 3AM show!

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