Group A, Beta-Hemolytic

Strep throat. My rapid in-office test was positive this afternoon, so they didn't bother to send a culture. My temperature was 102.8 (gratifying, since it was an objective measure to reflect--and somehow justify--how crappy I was feeling). I started amoxicillin as soon as I got home from the CVS with my little bottle stuffed full of cream-colored capsules. While I was waiting for my prescription to be ready, I also did some self-pity shopping: an Entertainment Weekly (our subscription ran out, and I've been missing it), an Oprah magazine, a bottle of lime-flavored diet coke, and a big bar of dark chocolate.

I slept most of the day after that. Pete did all of Cassie's evening stuff--dinner, bath, bed. Now I'm tired but not sleepy, and feeling weird and spacy and also intensely bored. I took some tylenol a couple hours ago, so I'm all clammy and sweaty from my fever going down.

Last spring and summer I had five bouts of strep throat, but it had been nearly a year, so I didn't immediately think of it when my throat was getting a little sore. After all, Cassie had been sick with a cold-ish kind of thing, so I figured it was just that. But then I recognized that there was something naggingly familiar about how I was feeling.

There's this particular sensation with strep throat, one that I've spent some time trying to put into words. Putting things into words is important to me, for some reason, and when people say that something is "indescribable," it tends to make me feel exasperated and impatient. It's not indescribable, I think, you're just too lazy to think hard and analytically enough to come up with words to talk about it. So I can't bring myself to give up on finding the right words to describe something so mundane and concrete as how strep throat feels. Part of my problem is that I cant really even figure out what sense I'm using to detect it. It's kind of a feeling, and kind of a smell, and kind of a taste. The closest I've come to describing it is to say that I keep expecting my throat, when I look at it in the mirror, to be covered with the kind of grayish tan scum you find in a kitchen drain that hasn't been cleaned in a while. It feels bacterial. It feels disgusting. It seems as if someone should attack my tonsils with a scrubby sponge and some Formula 409. But, well, anyway, I guess that's what the amoxicillin is for.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking a lot about learning to paint. They're hiring someone permanent at the place where I've been temping. And the administrator for the nursing refresher program is being rather snippy about my getting my health form in late (probably wouldn't bother me much if I didn't already feel stupid and guilty about it). Pete's been working like mad on the index for his book, and it was supposed to be done last Friday, and there's still no clear end in sight, and we're all starting to fray a bit from the extended crisis-mode push. But when I read on-line about how to get started painting, and how to stretch your own canvases, and how to take care of your brushes; when I think about compositions I'd like to start with; when I think about how much practice it will take to be as comfortable with a brush as I am with a pencil, the anxiety and guilt and crap all kind of fall away, and I feel so happy and serene. Painting in my head.