… Or something like it.

The last few weeks, I’ve had a cough that wouldn’t go away. I didn’t have a cold before it; one day I just started coughing up gunk. I kept feeling tired, but I attributed that to surgery recovery. So I waited a full 10 days to see if it would go away on its own (nope) and then made a doctor’s appointment.

Today when the doctor listened to my lungs, she said they sounded “crunchy.” That can’t be good. I can attest that when I breathe, I hear a lot of not only wheezing but sort of gurgling, too. And my chest hurts when I breathe.

Without doing a chest X-ray, she couldn’t say for sure that I had pneumonia. I could’ve done one, but the result would be the same: She prescribed me a nice 7-day course of antibiotics, plus back on the two inhalers I still have left over from Pneumonia Round 2, back in 2018.

I started on the antibiotics immediately when I got home. Funnily enough, I simultaneously spiked a fever and started feeling substantially worse shortly after I got back. All those days of low-level coughing, and today I get hit by the freight train of bacterial infection.

I took the day off work after feeling exhausted just sitting at my desk. I have exactly two days worth of PTO left, which is good, because I have two working days before I go on my previously planned break for Christmas. Odds are I’ve worked my last day between now and January.

The greatest irony, though, is that tonight Ian and I were going to see the new Star Wars movie with a bunch of friends in a movie theater a friend of Ian’s rented out. I missed two previous Star Wars movie viewings–I believe it was Solo and Rogue One—for the very same reason. Both times I had pneumonia and missed it at the very last minute.

I’m going to be extra-cautious about getting sick whenever they announce the date of the next Star Wars movie.