Grumpy Sod - Epilogue, The Wonder Stuff

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Well, thanks to the miracle of penicillin - Phenoxymethylpenicillin, to be precise - I can now eat solid food and drink stuff without the sensation of inhaling broken glass whilst being simultaneously stabbed in the throat by demons with hat pins. And this after only five of the twenty-eight dose course - which I will of course complete, as I've always done; well except on the one occasion I was prescribed Erythromycin, which nearly killed my gut, but that's another story.

That's what I love about penicillin, it gets to work pretty quick, which affords early relief from painful infections, allowing you to get back on track quicker. I reckon I'll have seen the last of the symptoms of this bloody thing by the weekend, but I can feel the little bacterial sods retreating and regrouping, like some hideous, microscopic, guerilla army; hiding in dugouts and waiting to push on again when my defences are down. So I kind of see the rest of the course as an exercise in carpet-bombing the little buggers into submission for at least the next decade, God willing.

My not being hospitalized every ten or twelve years or so throughout my life is not all that I owe the drug, but my very existence itself. My dad, before he met my mother, suffered a [rather nastier than my episodic strep throats] bout of double-pneumonia with pleurisy, which before antibiotics, would certainly have been his youthful demise. Which makes one think. I'll keep taking the tablets. Oh, and by the way, my voice is almost back: I will soon be able to vent my anger at the Tories and their waste-of-space government, without stabbing pains in my larynx and sounding like Tom Waits with the flu, very shortly. That's all for now, folks...

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