Not My Fault, But I Do Need a Drink

I am now on my third dose, out of forty, of dicloxacillin.

And as with all of this adventure, the freedom from IV antibiotics comes with a few . . . let us say . . . speedbumps? Challenges? Dumb shit I have to deal with?

I'm supposed to take dicloxacillin for times a day. Every six hours. Okay, so 7 am, 1 pm, 7 pm and 1 am. Reasonable enough. Would like to probably do a 6 am start, but didn't get there this morning and probably won't for the duration, so 7 am it is.

Now I'm either supposed to take it an hour before eating . . . or two to three hours after eating. And this is what is tricky to me. This is what just caused me to take a spoon out of my mouth and spit yogurt back into a cup. Because it was 6:53 . . . so I can't eat. I can't eat until 8 pm.

So the arbitrary eating rules are going to get to me. The thinking . . . wait . . . can I eat this bite of cantaloupe now? Or do I have to wait an hour? And yes, I could shift everything over to say 10 am . . . which, let's see, math . . . 4 pm, 10 pm and 4 am. But I don't want to set my alarm for 4 am and heaven forbid if I miss a dose. Because I will not go back to that doctor unless I can say with a straight face that I followed ALL the instructions.

Infectious disease doctor is pretty sure that I do not want to get well . . . in fact, I think that he thinks, that I'm actually seeking out staph germs and putting them all over my body. That I want to be "colonized". That I go, late at night and frolic in unknown McDonalds ball pits . . . and eat candy off the sidewalk. I sneak out and rub my legs on bums. And then go to public restrooms and just lounge around. And I'm not even polite enough to get interesting staph germs, like MRSA. I'm just out collecting regular, old, simple staph. How impolite.

When my fifth abscess did not get better as fast as he would like, it was my fault. I must had not followed the Epsom salt instructions. That was the problem.

So I have to jump through all the hoops, just in case I have to go back. Recurrence is high for staph. Just naturally high. There are support groups . . . some people have it for years. And I want to be able to look him in the eye and say "Nope. Not my fault." (You asshole.) I followed all the instructions.

So in another 45 minutes I can eat the damn yogurt and what ever else I would like for three hours. Dicloxacillin smells funny, which can only mean that I will smell like dicloxacillin in a matter of moments.

Oh, and one can drink alcohol and take antibiotics . . . it just isn't the most stellar of ideas, as your liver is working overtime with processing the antibiotics. Urban myth.

Okay. Just nine and a half more days of this.