Just A Little One

I’ve been unwell for about 12 days. It started with what I thought was a bout of coughing brought on by something “going down the wrong way” but the coughing continued. Last Wednesday I thought I was getting better but then went down again. On Friday I missed school. Yesterday, Monday, I gave into pressure from Nurse Joanna and went to the doctor.

The doctor confirmed Nurse’s suspicions: I have une petite bronchite, otherwise known as a small dose of bronchitis. I hate to think what une grande bronchite would be like! Oh, and why is it feminine?

Actually, I used to get bronchitis regularly when I was 5 or 6 years old. We were living in Stafford at the time. The doctor said that when we moved away from Stafford, the bronchitis would stop. I had chest x-rays, the lot: nothing else wrong. Sure enough, when we moved to Alsager in South Cheshire (or North Stoke on Trent, depending on your point of view), the bronchitis stopped.

The British and French approaches to General Practice medicine are very different. The default British approach is “It will probably sort itself out before too long, come back if it gets worse.” The default French approach is to throw medications of every shape and size at the nasties and beat them into submission!

So I have stuff to take once a day, other stuff to take twice a day and two things to take three times a day. I am hoping to see a metaphorical white flag of submission waving from my bronchioles soon…

I’ll stay off school until I can sensibly face lessons at 8:35am — at the moment, at this time of the morning I am a coughing and groaning machine, hoping that the little chaps with the hammers in my head will stop for a rest sometime soon. Hey ho…