Visiting the nurse practitioner

I've had a cold and we don't have a regular doctor yet, so I went to a walk-in clinic in a Walgreens. Greg went in a few weeks ago when he had the same thing--before he gave it to me. He got antibiotics. I got an inhaler.

I've had a nasty cough with this cold, and when the coughing gets bad, I can hear a high-pitched wheezing deep in my chest. In fact, the thing that prompted me to go in was that the wheeze was so loud that Greg could hear it while he was sitting across from me on a different couch.

So I made a point to tell the nurse practitioner about this wheezing sound, and she said, "I did hear a wheezing sound twice when I listened to your chest, but that wheezing is something you can only hear with a stethoscope."

That confused me, because I know I heard myself wheezing, so I said, "I could hear it earlier, though."

"You can hear the stuff rattling around in your throat, that junky sound that comes with post-nasal drip," she said. "But a deeper wheezing in the chest is something you can't hear with the ear. You need a stethoscope."

"No, it wasn't rattly," I said. "It was high, like wheeeee." I made a squealy sound that went up at the end. It was a pretty good imitation. But she wasn't convinced.

"No, that's the kind of sound you can only hear with a stethoscope. Not with just your ear," she said.

"You calling me a liar?" I said, getting up from my chair. "Because we can call my husband right now and he'll tell you the same thing. He heard it from the couch next to me."

"I don't need to talk to you or your old man," the nurse said, tossing her stethoscope on the bed and rising up to meet me. "You're so sure you can hear wheezing in your lungs, huh? Let me ask you something. Did you go to nursing school for six years? Are you $165,000 in debt? Do you have a stethoscope? I didn't think so. So whatever it is you think you heard, you didn't. You're not qualified."

"Oh, okay," I said, sitting back down. "I guess I didn't hear it, then."

"Damn right you didn't," the nurse practitioner said. "Now let me write you that prescription for Albuterol and we'll have you on your way."

(Everything before "You calling me a liar?" is true. Also, I don't know for sure, but I think that after she looked in my ears with her lightscope thing, she didn't change anything and just stuck it directly up my nose. Which didn't seem too sanitary to me. So I don't think I'll go back to the walk-in clinic at Walgreens.)

***

In other news, opening weekend of the play went better than I thought it would. Yay! Here were the mishaps: During one performance, the briefcase sat on the stage doing nothing until we finally figured out that it needed to come off for the last scene and picked it up just in time---phew. During another performance, an actor forgot to bring his raincoat onto the stage, so another actor had to run off the stage to grab it. In another panicked moment, we almost missed our cue to go onstage and change a scene. Another time we thought we were missing our cue but we weren't and I ended up standing in the hallway when an actor opened the "front door" and I was visible to part of the audience for a second before I bolted back into the props room.

Not too bad for opening weekend. I hope and anticipate that it will get smoother and we will have fewer mistakes for the next four weekends.