Sleep Easy, Ambien

“But I feel fine now,” I protested this morning. “Look, I can walk, I can move both my arms, I can breathe, I feel fine.”

“I talked to my mama,” answered my Viennese bride, Dagmar. “She thinks you should go to the doctor.”

“But I know exactly how I feel,” I said. “Your mama is all the way across town! She doesn’t know what’s going on… I am NOT going to go to the doctor, and that’s final!”

“You might have pleurisy,” the doctor told me half an hour later. “Or maybe shingles. It’s hard to tell. If it gets worse in the next day or two, call us.” He went on to explain that shingles happens when the chicken pox virus left over from when we all had chicken pox as kids leaves it’s dormancy along the spinal column and migrates along a nerve running from our spine around our lower ribcage. He said that sometimes you can see little spots in a line around your ribcage. I don’t have that yet. “I’ll give you a prescription for the pain,” he concluded.

“Should he rest?” my vife asked the doctor.

“Sure, if he wants to,” said the doctor. “Make sure he drinks a lot, too.” That fit in perfectly with my plans – resting peacefully in a nice comfy bar drinking lots of fluids.

“I’m happy I feel better,” I said to Dagmar as we walked back to the car after talking to the doctor. “I was worried that I might not be able to go see the band play at the Chesterfield club tonight. I’ve only seen one band play there since they opened three weeks ago. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve been waiting all week to go out tonight…” I trailed off, noticing the look on my wife’s face.

“You vill do no such ting!” she rumbled. “You are going to go home and drink apple juice and sleep! I vill not have you going out tonight.”

“But you promised me last week that I could go out tonight,” I protested. “I’ve been looking forward to this all week! I am NOT going to sit at home all day – I feel fine. I’m going to go outside, I’m going to visit people, I’m going to go see the band play. I am NOT going to sit around in my robe all day.”

Actually, the robe is pretty comfortable. I looked “pleurisy” up on the Internet. I don’t think it’s serious. It’s hard to tell, though, because there’s a huge “Ambien” ad right smack-dab in the middle of the screen, right where it says if pleurisy is something to be worried about. I went to Ambien’s web site and found my way through their maze to the “Contact Us” page, intending to write them an e-mail asking that they tell me what their ad was covering on the pleurisy web site, but they made it so difficult to write them an e-mail that I eventually gave up. I’m going to show them what I think by simply not using Ambien any more. (Tylenol P.M. works MUCH better anyway!)