Home from the hospital. Thanks for all your good wishes. I was only sort of sick for a couple of weeks, then after the eardrum problem the pneumonia went from zero to sixty in about four hours. I couldn’t breathe, my heart was racing, blood pressure going crazy, my fever was way up – I couldn’t even walk. Crazy! Also, the clue (that I should remember from my previous, less serious pneumonia cases) – coughing up blood. If you are coughing up anything striped with blood, go to the doctor immediately. Do not pass go. That seems like a no-brainer, but when it first happened to me as a college student, I didn’t think anything about it. Also, if you are asthmatic, um, don’t catch pneumonia.
PS – People with autoimmune problems often have reactions to their IVs. I did! Yeah, you don’t want that.

In an attempt to be educational about my health excitements, here is a bit about the class of antibiotics they gave me via IV at the hospital for the last couple of days. Mine was called Rocephin, which sounds like “rose-fin.” Anyway, a little about the mysterious origins of today’s antibiotic-of-the-week, courtesty of Wikipedia:
“Cephalosporin compounds were first isolated from cultures of Cephalosporium acremonium from a sewer in Sardinia in 1948 by Italian scientist Giuseppe Brotzu [2]. He noticed that these cultures produced substances that were effective against Salmonella typhi, the cause of typhoid fever…”
Thank you, sewage! Another strong antibiotic, called Vancomycin, was discovered, I believe, in a kind of rainforest mud.
Interestingly, the doctors told me they were almost sure I had viral pneumonia; but gave me IV antibiotics anyway, and, again interestingly, they did seem to help.

Thanks again ya’ll for your encouraging words…Too sick to talk on the phone, still – I just start coughing when I walk across the room or have a fine-minute conversation. Not sure how long this phase lasts, but I hope not long. I want to try to get back to teaching work and regular life asap. Meanwhile, looking forward to catching up on sleep and trying to avoid hurting myself coughing – ow, my ribs, ow, my lower back, ow, ow ow! (Please leave any helpful tips for painful coughs in the comments 🙂 – I’m allergic to the ingredients in most cough syrups, including guafinisin and codeine, so all advice about how to control a cough without them welcome!)

I hope to soon be blogging about poetry (and more healthy circumstances) soon.