ACID PAIN
[a.k.a. O God, I Am Sick!]

I have just come back from the real acid pit. And it is a horrible, wretched place. Last week, I was in writhing, agonizing pain. Last week I was sick as HELL!

FEVERISH TONSILS

First it was my tonsils. Annually I get tonsilitis. Germs build up. Sugar builds up. My throat gets irritated by the weather and boom! I wake up with a sore throat. This year, it was a double whammy with influenza to add up to the excitement. I woke up last Tuesday with a throat rubbed raw by bacteria and lots of phlegm. It quickly escalated into tonsilitis. Difficulty swallowing, runny/blocked nose, the works.
___ As a kid I used to hate gargling with salt and warm water. It used to be the bane of my existence-- it was like rolling seawater in your mouth-- and it made me retch. But hell, when your throat aches, this is the simplest, most effective (not to mention, cost-effective) solution. There was a day last week when I gargled thrice. And it did no good. Seemed like the phlegm in my throat was aggravating the entire tonsil situation. Not only was the larynx coping with inflamed, swollen tonsils, it was struggling with the viscuous phlegm! Agh!

And of course, I was riddled with fever. Chills. Sweat. Cold sweat. Runny nose. Trickling rivulets of snot. Blankets warm with stagnating breath and days-old perspiration. Not a pretty sight at all. (Not a pretty smell either.) And all due to my throat. I could not eat, I had a hard time drinking and every slight breeze would send me under the sweat-stained sheets. Horrific. I was weak, I was sick, I was cold.
___ After a day or two in its unrelenting grasp, without much food in my system, I decided to hit the antibiotics and asked my wife (whoo-hoo! there's a new word in my vocab!) to get some Erythrocin-- which is known in the generics world as Erythromycin-- the antibiotic I've been taking since I was ten. After the first two tablets (500 mg) taken within the span of 16 hours, I was cured! Lo and behold, the germs in my throat abated, I could swallow with dignity. I could eat.

However, something was wrong. I didn't FEEL like eating. And if you know anything at all about me, that can only mean that I am VERY VERY sick. Except...my tonsils had healed...so where?
___ And then I could feel it in my gut. Acid. Rolling in cycles that would tantalize you with periods of ease and then stab harder when you're relaxed.

ACID CYCLES

My wife and I had headed over to the food court of SM Cubao and ingested some congee, glad that the fever had abated. Thirty minutes after, while on our way home, my salivary glands went into overload and I was spitting like a hose. The bile rose. I had to fight to hold it back. The minute we got home, I let go.
___ The congee, the beef tripe, all came out in a sickening gush of bitter, bitter yellow liquid. I was heaving and belching as I vomited, because after the congee, there wasn't anything left to heave out. Spasm. Heave. Belch. Spit. Wipe.
___ Throughout the course of that night, I was vomiting 20 minutes after ingesting anything. Biscuits. Soup. One piece of bread. Various attempts at stemming the acid tide with the use of Kremil-S (antacid) tablets were for naught. The bile was coming on and I was weakening.

This was not the end of it either.

MOVING HOUSE

On top of all the physical anguish, my wife and I were in the midst of deciding which apartment to pick. The temporary lease on our Cubao place was expiring that weekend and we had to pick from two very different locations. Computations were made, budgets drawn. Opinions expressed. We opted for the apartment in Makati. I was to go the following morning and give the downpayments... whether or not I was vomiting... since my wife had a class to attend which she couldn't miss.
___ Good thing our friend (and maid-of-honor) Fiona lives in the same apartment complex. She helped out with the real estate broker and afterward, suggested driving me to Makati Med to go see a doctor.
___ Excellent advice. So there I was, the proud new tenant of a Makati 2-bedroom unit, but with a stomach still boiling with excess acids that did not want to go away.

A quick call to a doctor friend we fondly call "Aids" (now there's an irony) confirmed my suspicions. Either my acid was being caused by an ulcer (though his description of the pain as a "sharp stabbing thing going all the way to your lower back" did not seem to fit) or was a reaction to the Erythromycin antibiotic I was taking. Reportedly, the drug causes major stomach upset. I had presumed as much, since the acid was usually produced within an hour or so after I'd taken an antibiotic.

MAKATI MED: AKA "THE MARKETPLACE"

Anyway off to Makati Medical Center, or Makati Med for short-- medical bastion for the wealthy. Or so I thought.
___ Immediate reaction to Makati Med on a Saturday at noon: it's a fucking marketplace! People line the hallways. People breed in the elevators. People litter the lobbies. Outside the doctors' offices, people sit patiently, like molds in a saucepan's handle.
___ We asked the information booth whom we could see regarding gastric trouble and they referred us to a Dr. Benjamin Luna, doctor of internal medicine, cardiologist and (what the hell?) DIVING medicine? You mean you need doctors specializing in diving diseases? "Hey doc, I have a deep throat. Cure it."
___ We waited for almost 45 minutes. Apparently Benjie was upstairs tending to patients who had Diving Diseases. When I was finally called in and gave my loooooong story, he asked me about the pain. Then he poked around my stomach area and isolated the source.

"It's coming from here isn't it?"
Yes.
"Does the pain stay here or does it move elsewhere?"
It stays there.
"OK. Your stomach lining was definitely irritated. It could either be the Erythromycin or it could be something you ate in the last 24 hours. Can you think back and isolate a food you ate?"
Goto? Lugaw? Biscuit? Soup? Nothing out-of-the ordinary.
"I'm giving you something to help you digest quicker, it's called Motillium, take it 3 times a day, 30 minutes before eating. And something to decrease your acid, only once a day, it's called Losec."

And he hands me a prescription which I must wait another 15 minutes for overworked pharmacists to get. Turns out the description of Losec is "acid pump inhibitor". Sounds so cool I decided I'd write a ripping techno instrumental with that as the title once my keyboards are set up at our new apartment.
___ Thirty minutes after I took the first Losec, I was okay. I could finally eat. And take a bath. Much to the relief of my wife.

TONSILS: ROUND TWO

Except that four days later, my tonsilitis returned with a flourish. Even vigorous gargling with Betadine merely irritated the swollen little critters. (What are tonsils for anyway? Can anyone answer that please? Jeeves? God?)
___ Of course, five minutes after I ask, God answers me in the form of askjeeves.com and tells me: "Tonsils: a name commonly referring to the palatine tonsils, two ovoid masses of lymphoid tissue on either side of the throat, at the back of the tongue. The tonsils act as filters against disease organisms."
___ Ah! So if they're swollen, that means, the filters are full and have to be cleaned? Parang aircon pala ito. Or those Jetcyclo thingies above ovens/gas ranges that suck out the cooking vapors... Buti na lang once a year lang pala ito.

Anyway, my throat was hell again and the chills started to return. I was feeling weak once again and crappy. I took some tablets of Tempra for the fever, but half a day later, I was drenched in sweat and still no closer to healing my throat. Enter (for a repeat performance) my enigmatic doctor friend Aids on the phone...

Me: "Pare, bumalik ang tonsilitis ko."
Aids: "Tinapos mo ba ang cycle of antibiotics?"
Me: "Hindi. Sabi kasi ni Dr. Luna, tigilin ko. And take the Losec and Motillium. So I did. And now it's back.I think my acid was being caused nga by the Erythromycin."
Aids: "OK. So what's your throat like? Are your tonsils swollen?"
Me: "My wife says they're swollen and red-- irritated."
Aids: "Alright, I have to assume it's really just tonsilitis and prescribe another antibiotic. Take 500 mg of Amoxicillin..."
Me: "Wait dude, I'm allergic to Penicillin. At least, that's what I remember. I was a kid pa when they found out."
Aids: "Aw man. You're not giving me many options here. So your stomach lining was irritated by erythromycin and as a kid you were allergic to penicillin? Okay. Take 2 tablets a day of Cotrimoxazole, 800/160 mg for a week. Pero try it out first, if you're still allergic to it, I'll have to find another antibiotic for you."

So, while my wife went to her weekly class I went to the drugstore and got me some Cotri tabs. That very same afternoon, my throat started to feel better. The next day I was doing chores again like a good little boy. Fever gone. Throat normal.
___Thank God for friends who had the good sense to take up medicine as a profession!

And that dear sirs, is the story of this year's bout with... Tonsilitis!!!

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