Lest Peter-of-the-future wonder “what happened to Peter over the Christmas week in 2011?”, here is a quick update.

After flirting off-and-on with various rhinoviruses over the fall, which made for a season of coughing, sore throat and general out-of-shapedness, my body seemed to be healthy come Christmas time. We had an excellent pre-Christmas fest with our friends A. and D., followed by an excellent Christmas Day made all the better by the inclusion of Sergey, who was here until the 27th when he flew back to Ukraine (where he gets another Christmas in January!).

On the Thursday of Christmas week I woke up with a mild sore throat which got steadily worse over the course of the day. Mid-afternoon I took the bus up to CBC Charlottetown to tape a piece for the afternoon Mainstreet CBC Radio One program on New Year’s levees and it’s a wonder I made it through (if you listen to the final result you’ll notice that I sound vaguely head-stuffed and my voice starts to fall apart in the final minutes).

By the end of the day I felt like hell, and when I woke up on Friday morning I had the mother of all sore throats: this wasn’t a rhinovirus this time, I realized, but something far more evil. Mindful that I was just ahead of a 3-day holiday, I rallied myself down to the Boardwalk Walk-in Clinic for 8:00 a.m. By the time I got there, 5 minutes after the doors opened, there were already 11 people ahead of me; and the clinic doesn’t see patients until 9:00 a.m. So I was glad to be there early.

I got myself number 12 and was told to come back at 10:10 a.m. and, sure enough, when I came back I was seen right away.

There are two types of doctors when it comes to dealing with patients presenting with strep-throat symptoms, the “yah, it’s strep throat, here’s the antibiotics” doctors and the “we’ll do a swab, send it to the lab, and get the results back in 3 days and decide on a course of treatment” doctors. Suffice to say that I had my fingers crossed for the former and was lucky enough to end up with just that: 10 minutes later I was lined up for an amoxicillin prescription and 30 minutes later I was at home, under 13 blankets, shivering away in the knowledge the, eventually, the end was near.

Amoxicillin promised to smash the streptococcus bacteria within 48 hours and it did: by midday on Sunday I was starting to feel better. Not wanting to inflict the infection on others I opted to miss the aforementioned New Year’s levees and instead stayed home on the couch watching endless Netflix movies and reruns of Big Bang Theory and Storage Wars.

By yesterday morning I was at about 90%, well enough to come into the office, and today I’m feeling better than I have in weeks.