My belated birthday dinner- FINALLY!

Even though my birthday was over a week ago, we have been trying to plan a birthday dinner with our Dallas friends for quite a while now- only, ever since my birthday, I’ve been SICK! It started while Ben was here. I had a sore throat, which, on the day he left, was accompanied by a bad cough. By Monday (which I took off work, hallelujah!!) my voice decided to completely leave as well. I managed to croak my way through lessons on Tuesday, but felt completely wretched by Wednesday.

It was by this time that I decided to visit the Minute Clinic. In case you haven’t heard, these are the “doc-in-a-box” centers inside your neighborhood CVS Pharmacy. They are very limited to what they can treat, it turns out. We went to the one only a block away from us, only to be turned away the minute I mentioned “wheezing” as one of my symptoms. Turns out, if the patient even shows a hint of pneumonia, they have to refer them without even taking a blood pressure. This is for legal reasons since they can’t test for oxygen intake or take a xray of your lungs and such.

Anyways, being referred to pay $200+ at an ER or a CareNow clinic doesn’t look like much fun, especially when you have no insurance (alright, I’ve been a bit of a slow poke about getting the paperwork done…) and when you’re mom’s a nurse who’s had pneumonia a million+ times and is pretty sure you don’t have it.

So, while we don’t advocate this kind of behavior, we simply drove to another Minute Clinic 20 mi. away and didn’t mention the wheezing:) For 59 bucks they diagnosed me as having bronchitis and sinusitis. Both of these did not take a genius to figure out, based on the fact that the entire area around my nose and forehead was and still is swollen up like a tomato (…eww??) and I was coughing up my lungs. SO I got my antibiotics and my lung-numbing pearl-like pills and was on my way. Kind of a scary concept, those lung numbing pills. What if I swallow a spoon??? How will I know or cough it up?? There are lots of things to ponder when you’re sick.

The long and short is, I only worked a total of 15 hours this week, and, as a result, had many many lessons to make up. I rescheduled them all for this Saturday morning, only to come down with ANOTHER fever Friday night!!! SO not fair. I had to cancel everything, along with our confession appt. with Father John and the birthday dinner we had planned with our friends.

But it turned out okay. We rescheduled for tonight, and surprisingly, everyone was able to make it on short notice. We went to Chili’s and had a great time talking about philosophies of education (hey, Josh, Photius and I are all High School English Teachers, so what’d you expect??) and listening to Photius go on about the theologians he hates most- the “Three A’s- Augustine, Aquinas and Anselm”. Obviously Allanah had a bit of a problem with this, seeing as she’s Catholic and her closest brother is actually NAMED Anselm after the man himself, but she was able to take it all with a grain of salt and chuckle as we rose to their defense. Maybe a better word than defense would be a “more moderate” opinion.

Anyways, here are a few pictures if you want to see!

Here is my birthday dessert:

Here is the human vacuum finishing off my dessert after everyone had taken a bite:)

This one is just the girls, if you discount screaming Isaac and also absent little Genevieve who was with her daddy across the table. From left to right- Allanah, me, Heather, Jenny and Carissa.

Here is all of us together. Not the grandest of pictures, but my camera battery was dying.

That’s all! Here’s hoping I won’t get sick like this again this season, but also being thankful for the fact that we have friends who were willing to reschedule so many times for my birthday:)