ANTIBIOTIC PARADE

I developed a sinus infection a few weeks ago, and despite my determination to ignore it, it didn't go away. So on Monday I called my primary care physician and convinced her to prescribe me an antibiotic for it without coming in to see her. I felt a little guilty about playing up my leg situation for her, but this is my week off, and I'm not getting up off of the couch unless I absolutely have to.

She called in a prescription for Levaquin, which is vogue in sinus infection treatment these days. I swear she's prescribed it for me once before, and I didn't have any side effects then, but perhaps because I'm also taking Erthromycin for the pin site infection who will not die (which I forgot to mention to my doctor), I had crazy side effects this time.

Immediately after taking it, I felt tremendously dizzy and lightheaded. It was kind of like that very first Vicodin (oh, the memories!) After about two hours, the dizziness went away, but I was now wide awake. Like I was on speed wide awake. I tried to go to bed, but I just laid there, having bizarre thoughts, which I can't really describe other than to say that they didn't feel like thoughts I would have, but rather thoughts a crazy person would have.

So I was up until 4 in the morning, high on antibiotics. When I called my doctor the next day to get a different antibiotic, her receptionist tried to convince me that my side effects were only because I didn't eat enough food with it. But I did eat right before I took it. You have to eat a lot, she said. But it kept me up for hours and made me feel crazy! Okay, fine, she said, and finally put me on with my doctor.

My doctor apologized for the side effects. Yeah, that can happen with that drug, she said. Thanks for the warning! She prescribed me Augmentin, the name brand for Amoxicillin, which I have taken many times and have never had side effects from. I finally told her about the Erthromycin for the pin site infection, and she told me to check with my leg doctor to see if I didn't need to take both. And I checked with him, and he told me to take both.

So now I'm on a parade of antibiotics. Anything living in my body, good or bad, should be dead by the end of the week. And let's just hope that I'm not building up some sort of super immunity to antibiotics. I'm going to need them for when the bird flu comes.