There are some honors worth having, and some “honors” that you never want to receive. Take the 2003 Blog Awards, for example. Now, I like Allah. He makes my sarong feel funny, and that’s not an easy thing to do. But, c’mon. Allah never posted his breasts on the internet (if Allah is his real name, you know what I mean?) Not that I’m bitter, mind you.

Thing is, I recently received an award that I could’ve lived the rest of my life without.

You see, I went to the doctor on Monday because that flu I had two weeks ago still seems to be lingering. I no longer feel like I played in the Super Bowl without pads or a helmet, but I haven’t been able to taste or smell anything for weeks now and my face feels like it’s going to explode. Oh, and have I mentioned that every single second of my life for nearly a month has been lived with the feeling that someone is sticking an ice pick in my right ear, poking it down through my Eustachian tube and into my throat then turning it ever so ungently until my throat has been rubbed and scored raw? So, I tell all of this to the doctor who nods and pokes and prods me until I’m ready to slug her for inflicting so much pain when she should be patting my hand and passing me painkillers.

And she says… “Gee, you have the worst sinus and ear infection I’ve seen in 27 years of practice!” Then she calls in her nurse. And her intern. And someone whose function in her office is probably no more significant than pouring urine from one cup into another but who – based on her gleeful clucking – at least recognizes when the doctor has pushed a human being past the limits of pain and into the realm of dizzying agony.

“Think we’ll have to give you a shot,” the doctor says, and before I can suck the snot out of my nose and down my throat so I can remind her that I’m allergic to penicillin and all of its derivatives, her nurse has yanked down the waistband of my skirt and jabbed what was undoubtedly a square needle into the topmost fleshy part of my damn near perfect ass.

“That wasn’t pen – ” I began, planning to remind her of my allergy. Unfortunately, my plans were interrupted by a bout of anaphylactic shock, a fact of which I was mostly unaware since I was on the floor struggling to breathe shortly before passing out. Lucky for me, I was also unaware that a nasty, scaly, mean-looking rash was breaking out over my entire lower body, threatening to mar the perfection of that aforementioned damn near perfect ass. Of course, by the time they’d revived me enough for the doctor to ask “Are you allergic to penicillin?” my tongue was too thick for me to mumble: “YES, bitch, and if you’d read my chart you would’ve known that!”

So, anyway.

Did you know that a doctor can prescribe antihistamines that render you utterly incapable of remembering what “keys” are, much less how to insert them in the ignition so you can get home? Did you know that, given a large enough dosage of those kind of antihistamines, your 3-year-old child makes more sense than you? And did you also know that a doctor who is so stupid she’d shoot you up with a medication without first having checked your chart is still capable of locating your cell phone in your purse and calling your husband’s office to inform his secretary that you need a ride home and making it sound like it’s your fault and describing your predicament in such dire terms that the secretary feels obligated to call your spouse – who is out of the country and can’t possibly get home early – and tell him that you’re barely clinging to life?

Oh, and did you know that it takes nearly 6 hours for those kind of antihistamines to wear off, which is ample time for the secretary to drive you and your child home, contact your husband and assure him you aren’t dying, and then watch the child while you’re busy drooling in your bathroom and wondering why the hell you went to see a doctor in the first place since you feel so much worse now than you did before you went to see that incompetent bitch her?

So, many thanks to Kevin for popping in here to let you know I didn’t have internet access – a fact which honestly didn’t bother me after I got home. It’s probably a good thing I couldn’t get online, anyway. I’ve learned through observation that it’s best not to blog under the influence. Heh.