Apparently there’s nothing wrong with me.

A brief timeline:

February 12: I start coughing…a lot. It’s really bad and my boss sends me home. The coughing is pretty bad, but I never have a fever or anything, just the cough…

March 2: My cough is almost gone. Then I do something stupid and jump into Lake Michigan in freezing temps and the cough comes back with a vengeance.

April 7: Still kind of coughing, it’s mostly gone but I’ll have an attack at least once a day. Sitting at work I yawn and all of a sudden I feel a crackle in my ear, then everything gets cloudy. Now starts the ears being clogged constantly.

April 14: Wake up at 5am feeling like shit. Get out of bed to throw up. Crawl back into bed and decide I am not going to work. For most of the day I feel fine. Then, as I am preparing to go to bed at 10pm a headache hits and I feel nauseous. I go to vomit everything I’ve eaten that day up. My head hurts and it’s a worse pain than anything I have ever felt before. I am pretty much incapacitated on the floor of the bathroom and crying from the pain. I really feel as if something is really truly wrong with me.

At this point I decide that I should go to the ER. Once I get there I basically have to wait 2 hours before I even see a doctor. By that point I have thrown up everything I possibly could into the bathroom and my headache is basically gone. Did I mention that this is the same hospital that years ago gave me Novocain then waited half an hour to do the stitches, at which point the Novocain had been completely worn off?

Anyways…So I see the doctor. She looks at my throat and says she sees nothing wrong with it. (WTF? I’ve been coughing for two months now…) And then she won’t do a throat culture. She looks at my ear and says she sees a little fluid in there. She makes me drink orange juice to see if I will keep it down and then says that if I don’t they are hooking me up to an IV. Yeah, there was no way I was not going to keep that damn juice down. Then she prescribed me some Claritin…which I could get without a prescription.

So, there we have it. After spending the night (I was there till 2:30 am) in the ER: Official doctor diagnosis that despite coughing for two months straight, and despite not being to hear out of my right ear and despite vomiting up everything and having the headache to end all headaches…Val has nothing wrong with her. 🙁