MORE DOCTOR JEW

Yesterday I mentioned that I would be seeing Dr. Jew today in connection with a sore-throat from the sitra achra. Really, I cannot exaggerate how sore was the throat. Give it a name and call it Darth Vader (which is what I sounded somewhat like).

I mentioned the rapid strep test as a probable option.


Lesson one:
The rapid strep test is not used very much anymore. Some doctors will only use it if they have an kvetshing mother to pacify, and are fairly certain that the test will show a negative. Reason being that if there is sufficient evidence for a bacterial infection, they will treat it anyhow, and a rapid strep test would only confirm what they already knew.


Lesson two:
Do NOT respond to a casual remark said to no one in particular in a waiting room crowded with little old Cantonese people. Despite the evident deafness of at least half the people there, all two dozen of them heard the kweiloh clearly speak idiomatic Cantonese, and for the next half hour I had at least three conversations going on at once. Which, with a sore throat, is painful.

I guess some of them had never spoken to A... REAL... LIVE... WHITE... PERSON... WHO... UNDERSTOOD... A... HUMAN... LANGUAGE.

It's rather like being a carnival attraction.

Do not feed the round-eye, or poke him with a stick. He's real, trust us.

Savage Kitten had warned me that this would happen.


Lesson three:
Chinese do not line up very well. Forming orderly lines is something their contrarian nature utterly rebels against. What they form is a pulsating amorphous mass with a spigot. The person who is next in order is extruded from the spigot. It's like water overflowing, or perhaps sand in an hourglass. It is anarcho-syndicalism in action.


Lesson four:
More than fifty years ago there where two friends who graduated and returned to Chinatown at the same time, where they opened their practises side by side. One practise was a medical office, the other dispensed medicines and filled prescriptions. Their grandsons now run both businesses.

The two men were Jew Shi-Loong and Cheng Tai-Keung. Which the alert observer will find out by reading the framed congratulatory calligraphies on the walls of the medical practise, in which both men are named, and in formal language wished prosperity and a lifetime of approval for the benefit that they will surely be to the community.


Lesson five:
Azithromycin is taken once a day for five days. The most common side effects are diarrhoea (4 - 5%), nausea (3%), and stomach pain (2 - 3%). Less than one percent stop taking Azithromycin because of side effects. There is a Wikipedia article on Azithromycin, which says pretty much exactly what the manufacturer's site says, and what every other internet source says.

The first day one takes two tablets, on subsequent days one takes one tablet. Until the six pack is finished.

And yes, I do feel much better already. I can just feel all those little bacteria dying. And I am enjoying that feeling.

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Thank you, HalfNutCase and e-kvetcher for your commiseration and kind words. And yes, I'll go to the doctor much sooner in future.