Time for some Cartoons?

The lady at the insurance office replied to the customary "how ya doing?" with "It's Friday", with all the excitement of a kid in school Friday afternoon just a few more minutes till the bell.

Pretending to share in the enthusiasm was easy, since many many times that joyful "freedom" has been felt thru life...Such a good performance that its doubtful she had the slightest inkling that she was the only one there really excited .

That was the plan anyway, it just seems like people who actually only have a momentary business only relationship or knowledge of each other, owe it to each other to "keep that chin up", "show some white when ya smile", "leave 'em feeling even zippier than ya found them"...and maybe thats all she was actually doing too? Most of the time these days it just isn't really difficult being of good cheer, and sparkly energy...Today started out that way, but by afternoon things had changed.

Mrs Beans this past weekend, (wow, has a whole week passed!), had developed a very severe cough, and seemed to have precious little capacity to breathe. ER took a chest X-ray and easily diagnosed those air hoses going into the lungs were clogging up, bronchitis, they saw congestion in the bronchi but the X-ray had good news...if she could get those hoses cleaned up the lungs were clear... so they sent her on her way with cough suppressant and a 6day zpack of strong antibiotic.

By the time Fantastic Friday arrived she should've been chirping like a bird and grinnin like that insurance woman...but there was very little change, and that had to be a disappointing way to start the year. Almost a whole week, (the first week of a new year)...breathing very shallow, keeping very still, or and yet..inevitably,...coughing so hard it hurts all over. Some say that acute bronchitis generally lasts 7-10 days though so there was a glimmer of hope there to explain away the lack of improvement cause it was probably just gonna come all at once the last few days of that stretch.

The doctor seemed confused about the lack of progress, all those little readings they could take like blood pressure and temperature and what not was fine enough, so whats the holdup? Being the cautious man he's always been, he sends her over for one of those CT angio pulmonary things they call a Cat scan...but since they stick a needle in the arm and inject saline, then in a bit...some kind of dye...its probably not the way a person would really be planning to spend ..."a Friday". Yet once that was done...Yihaw! (Well, the exciting thought really centered more on getting back under the covers in that comfortable bed, where breathing shallow isn't too hard on a body).

About the time the covers were pulled and the car was cooling off, that doctor was on the phone personally..."good news is, didn't see any embolism"...(Now even if ya didn't know what an embolism was, it would still just SEEM like good news that there wasn't one crawling around inside). ..but the bad news is...it isn't just the hoses that were clogged, both the lungs were especially "infiltrated"..."bilateral pulmonary infiltrate". Its one thing to try to vacuum with a clogged hose, but when the bag is full, its a whole lot of work and not much cleaning. So even if the Bronchitis was completely cleared up (which it wasn't)...there wasn't much place for that air to go. As the good Doctor talked he seemed to kind of mumble off, not only did it just not make any sense...at this point things are getting a bit spooky.

So its just not easy to go in there and tell your very best friend in life that not only is it unlikely the next few days will be the high speed end of feeling good, better, best...but instead, things aren't going to be letting up much, and it could be a hard journey these next coming days. She took it all pretty good, or she put on a good performance, cause as she turned to sleep...all the final errands of the day were just beginning...(including the stop at the insurance office)

...It just didn't make any sense. All indicators pointed the other way...there wasn't anything environmental or burdensome these past 5 days...so why were things turning the wrong way? Thats not how its supposed to work. Thats when that little bottle of pills the Rheumatoid doctor had her on since spring came back to mind and that phone was working in reverse, soon that doctor was agreeing, it might be a good idea to stop those daily doses of Arava (Leflunomide) at least for now.

So there might have been several hours of errands to run, but there wasn't any doubt that there was going to be some heavy duty researching done when this Friday slowed down.

You'll have to wait till next blog to find out what all that turned up, if anything...so till then "keep that chin up", "show some white when ya smile", "leave 'em feeling even zippier than ya found them"...(and take a long slow deep breath and let it out even slower...cause even that is something ya just can't know how good it is till ya lose it). And if you remember right, there was something better than a Friday afternoon school bell...it was those Saturday mornings!