I’m sick. For what seems like the 100th time in the last year I caught a sniffle and it went straight to my tonsils. Those vestigial structures in our throats which seem to have no function whatsoever have seemingly found a life of their own in my body. I am never completely rid of them, even when I am in perfect health, they are larger than they have any right to be. When I get sick, they swell up to the size of golf balls and do a number on my throat and well-being in general.

I went to the local Instacare in hopes of getting some help. I guessed/hoped that the offending infection could possibly be strep or some other bacterial infection, as is usually the case. I waited for and hour to finally be seen at which point the painkillers which I had taken were beginning to lose their efficacy. I get called back by the nurse who (as I have long become accustomed) slaughters both my first and last names. She asks me what I’m allergic to and what medications I am taking and dutifully notes them all down on her little computer screen. I then get to wait again for another thirty minutes for the doctor to materialize.

He shows up and speaks down to me in a warm but slightly condescending manner. He asks me if I know the differences between bacteria and viruses and it was about then that I wanted to scream at him. I had been waiting for ninety minutes for a straight answer to confirm my own understanding of the situation and I was getting the Sesame Street version of healthcare. The doctor finally tells me that they had run all the tests they could on my culture and they had no clue what the infection could be, other than the fact that it certainly wasn’t a bacterial infection. He asks me what drugs I’m allergic to and proceeds to write me a prescription for an antibiotic in a family I am allergic to and have had no positive results from in the past. I’m in a foul mood and my body hurts so I just leave.

I then make the trip to the local Walgreens to fill this prescription in the hopes that it may help out in some small way. I decide to fill it knowing that if I have an allergic reaction it could very easily interfere with another drug I am taking and, in some remote and extremely unlikely circumstance, could result in the necrosis of my flesh and become a life-threatening issue. You think I’m joking, but I’m not. I walked up to the counter and the technician at the counter asks me how I’m associated with the girl who the prescription is made out to. I am used to this, as my name was chosen very lovingly, but was chosen at an inopportune time and is similar to a slew of different female names which are now largely associated with women in my age-group. I patiently explain that it’s for me and give her the correct pronunciation of my name. I get this ‘yeah, whatever’ look from her and I’m informed it will just take ten minutes for my potentially deadly prescription to be dispensed.

Thirty minutes later the pharmacist on duty calls me, again mispronouncing my name which is starting to irritate me, asking me if I’m aware that I’m most likely allergic to the drugs I’ve been prescribed. I tell him that, yes I’m fully aware and that if I die I will take it up with the person who prescribed the drugs. My patience was running thin. I had spent roughly two hours at the Instacare listening to children screaming and crying because their parents wouldn’t let them run wild anymore. I had then spent thirty minutes being subjected to the ‘Baby Boomer Trip Back to the 50s & 60s Sock-hop to Psychedelic Party Mix’ at Walgreens, and I was about to the point where I was hoping the antibiotics would kill me.

I’m slightly hopeful that I will soon be getting out of the hell that is Walgreens and will be able to go home and take some painkillers and take a nap. Instead, I get to wait for another fifteen minutes, in which I get to ponder the many ways I would kill Mick Jagger if given the opportunity to travel back into the past. The pharmacist calls me up, again mispronouncing my name, and hands me my prescription. I pay for my pills and head out to my car and open up the bag to find that they are pre-packaged in a nifty little box. I had the privilege of waiting forty-five minutes for something that took all of thirty seconds to put in a bag. I pondered going back in and complaining, but I realize that this would involve being subject to the Musak nightmare.

I head home and sleep for the remainder of the afternoon. As of yet, I have defied my normal poor luck with most medications and I have not yet had any side effects or reactions. I don’t handle being sick nearly as well as I would like; my temper gets short and I’m no where near as patient as I usually try to be. There aren’t many introspective musings or lessons I have learned from today. I just needed to vent more or less about things. I guess one important take-home message from this is that I should probably consider changing my name or at least alter the spelling to be less ambiguous. Oh and I should have my tonsils out.

I am the type of person who likes to make connections between the random events that happen in my life. In the past two weeks I have had a number of amazingly bad things happen, yet in my life I know the bad always brings good. There always seems to be a balance or equivalence that comes with the bad and good. And though the bad things have brought me a very large amount of stress, they have triggered events and decisions which are having positive outcomes.

Now this is generally pretty natural. I think most people make connections and recognize patterns in the events of their lives. The human brain is trained to recognize patterns and observant people will begin to see these patterns form over time. Often times the patterns are very contrived, and sometimes they are not. It’s how people recognize these patterns in their own unique way which defines them and how they respond.

I will write more, very soon, about the more broad patterns and cycles that I have lived through over the last couple weeks. What I was most keen to write about today was something far more obscure. I was engrossed in these very thoughts and ideas this evening while walking to my front door from my car. I had just needed to pop out to my car for a moment to grab a couple things. As I reached the door of my apartment, I found a cat laying, sphinx-like, on the landing facing me. This cat had not been there just moments before and it was not just any cat. This cat was a bold, shiny white cat.

Generally I am not the type to think about black cats crossing my path or walking under ladders or breaking mirrors. These things are just out there in the realm of weirdness and happenstance. But after the hellacious weeks I have had, just as I felt I may be reaching a point of closure, and just as I was beginning to wonder if I was really at such a point… A white cat crosses my path. Any other day, any other time, I would have casually dismissed such a notion. But tonight, it seemed fitting and almost comforting to get some form of very unlikely, scientifically useless, emotionally driven, cosmic sign that, “Yes, things will get better.”