The Worst Nine Months

No, this is not the memoir of an unplanned teenage pregnancy. It is me complaining about something much worse: my TB meds.

TB, or more formally, Tuberculosis, is a bacteria that eats the insides of your lungs. A quick google search of tuberculosis pull up many interesting facts, links, and other sentence fragments from the web pages:

-"Tuberculosis or TB (short for tubercles bacillus) is a common and often deadly infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria" -en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis


-"The presence of tuberculosis in some societies involves ritualistic processes to be completed to in the hope of clearing the ailment" -Tuberculosis.net


-"Alternative Names. TB; Tuberculosis - pulmonary ... Jatin M. Vyas, MD, PhD" -www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000077.htm


(take careful note of the last alternate name)


-"Health question: What is another name for tuberculosis? consumption is another name for TB, believe it or not" 




..some sites are considerably more believable than others. The phrase "believe it or not" is not very convincing at all when "Ripley's" isn't included in at least a 5 word radius. Even if the sentence went like this: "Alabama says 'Roll Tide' because a group of elephants is called a tide, believe it or not," said the idiot, Ripley's cousin. That's only a three-word buffer between "Ripley's" and "believe it or not," so I'll believe that over something like this: "Einstein's Theory of EverythingInTheWorld states, believe it or not, that paper is just dead tree bits."


In that situation, Ripley's cousin gets more credit than even Einstein. (A group of elephants is called a herd, btw- Ripley's cousin really is an idiot..)


Anyways, I say all of this to (somewhat) bring up my big point.


I Have Tuberculosis And I Might Drop Dead At Any Second...


Actually, it's dormant (sleeping), but I still have to take meds for it. It's also not contagious, so don't worry.


Normally, taking medicine to kill a potentially/most likely fatal bacteria that has infected my body wouldn't bother me, but it does this time. Here's why in order from what aggravates me the least to most:




First of all, I don't really like taking medicine. I'm not afraid of it, and it doesn't make me feel sick or nervous. I just don't feel like taking any kind of medicine. I think that if my body can handle something, then I should let it. By itself. Without medicine. I don't usually take symptom relievers like cough syrups, but those also taste incredibly nasty and I get chills just from smelling them. I'm more lenient with myself on headaches, mainly because they're not really caused by bacteria. I don't know exactly how headaches work, but I'm pretty sure they're not caused by a massive buildup of germs in my skull.


Next, the very intelligent doctors who went through years of medical school to learn to say "whelp, im just gonna stick this needle 'round here somewhere and hopefully we'll git that tricky sumbitch vein," said that if I had the bacteria in my body for over a year without showing symptoms, then I should be safe to live without taking action.


Seems to be good news, since I haven't ever coughed up blood or lung chunks. But the problem is that no one knows when I came into contact with the bacteria. It's like a mysterious haunting inside of me. No one knows where it came from or how it got inside me. There's roughly an eighteen year timespan that I could have breathed in the wrong person's cough. So, it'd be too risky to test the one-year theory. 


Probably the most confusing thing about this is the fact that if I was an active TB case, I'd only need SIX months of medicine until I was off the hook. But, because I'm healthy, I'll need NINE months of meds. What in the world? Why would a healthier person need more medicine? I guess I can understand that it'd be easier to tell if all the germs were gone in an active case. The signs of that would probably be that the person has stopped dying and coughing up their insides. But if they weren't showing signs of Jatin M. Vyas, MD., Ph D. in the first place, it'd be understandable to take a little more time to make sure all the little consumptions were gone so the world doesn't have to deal with a super-immune TB strain. But three extra months? That's an entire 1/4 of a year. That's like a whole season. That's taking the medicine for all of spring, and that's only the amount extra I have to do.


And the worst part about this is that I didn't even need the test in the first place. It was all a misunderstanding. I'm only having to go through this by accident. That's right. I only took the initial TB test because my mom signed me up for it. She only signed me up for it because the doctors said I needed it for college. They only said I needed it for college because they can't read a list of requirements correctly. Or something like that. I should really be thankful for what the doctors have done for me (saving my life when I was a baby)(twice), so I guess I'm really just disappointed in the Tuberculosis staff there. 


What's worse is that I think the Jatin M. Vyas MD., Ph D. medicine is just making me sick. As soon as I started taking it, I noticed my health declining. First it was a stuffy nose. Then it was a little cough. Now its a wash of mucus and a wheezy cough. Every time I take another stupid TB pill, I get a little closer to actually having TB. Maybe that's their plan. Spend three months actually giving me an active case of TB, THEN treating me for it. 


But there's nothing I can do about it now. I'm stuck taking nine months of this god-forsaken medicine. If I don't I think I get quarantined and they force the medicine down my throat every day. Down to my stomach (2:20ish).