Pills
I've become a pill-popper. Through this whole winter, I've been sick. I remember a week where I said "I haven't felt snotty all week." Then I got all snotty shortly there after. This has been a real problem since last year. I think moving to the sticks and mowing my own lawn have made things worse. I've had this constant cough since I moved to Houston at the ripe old age of five or so. This year has been particularly brutal.
Every morning I wake up and start coughing. I hack up a lung, spit it into the toilet and start take a warm shower where I proceed to hack up the other lung. It has gotten to the point that I don't like taking showers on the weekend because of the coughing.
At some point, I start popping over the counter (OTC) drugs to dull my symptoms. I take the following.
# Decongestant - make things move around better.
# Antihistamine. - keep the body from making more.
# Expectorant - loosen what is already there.
These medicines all work together very well. That is the trouble. They multiply each other's affects. You have to be careful particularly with antihistamines. You can screw up your urinary system pretty good if you are not careful. I take low doses of all of them when I mix them up. I chase them down with a analgesic or two some days.
All this makes me feel like an addict. I can tell days that I don't take this stuff. I clog up and can't breath. I'm sick of being sick. I don't know what to do about it. I've been to doctors. I've tried everything I can think of. I need a lung transplant or something. My body is just not meant for Houston weather.
My last doctor hinted that I might have asthma.  That would suck. There is just plane nothing you can do about asthma. I fear being diagnosed because it will fuck my insurance for the rest of my life. The president is about to do that for me with his new pay for it yourself insurance. I suppose we are all just supposed to shut up and die like good little nobodies. I hate the way this country treats it's people sometimes. Most of the people who run things have enough money to not care how the system is broken. We should make our elected officials live like us poor folks for a while before they can get any power. Yup, that will happen.
It makes me angry that I have to deal with insurance when I'm sick. I don't worry about getting better, I worry about getting over charged because I'm the only sucker who has insurance. No one else bothers to pay their medical bills, so I have to take up the slack.
I better leave it at that before I start really ranting on the subject.