Tessalon, Omnicef, and a heat index of 108.

According to Herr Doktor Babyface, I do indeed have a sinus infection; a bacterial superinfection after my summer cold. Which sucks, I must say, rocks. The bad news is that I'll feel rotten for a couple more days. The good news is that Herr Doktor Babyface believes me when I say I hate narcotics, and so hooked me up with some Tessalon for the cough. I'll sleep tonight, wake up in the morning (sadly), and not have to worry about itching and being dopey.

Which is good. With a heat index of 108*, I have enough to worry about. When it's this hot and humid (101*, 60%), the air conditioners at work tend to start getting overburdened and not working quite as well as they ought to. The temperature inside the building on the ground floor when I left today (early, to see HDB) was near 80. It was hotter upstairs. 

Patients don't like it when it's hot. Nurses don't like it when it's hot, but aside from sweating through scrubs and smelling worse than usual, there's not a lot about heat that's going to hurt us. People who've had large sections of their brains fingered, though, tend to have really crappy temperature-management systems internally: they get hot and cold quite easily. Add to that the usual number of people with high cervical spine injuries (who tend not to be able to regulate their own temperature either), and you're in for a fun day of ice bags and fans.

I'm thinking of moving, once my two years in the ICU is up, to somewhere with slightly less obnoxious summer weather. Spring here is such that you can go on a picnic during it, provided it doesn't happen while you're in the shower. Fall here is great, if you don't mind hay fever from hell. Winter is quite mild....but summer? Kills people. For reals.

Meanwhile, friends of mine a few hundred to a thousand miles north are talking cheerfully about camping and gardening and going for long walks in the balmy afternoon. If I went for a long walk in the balmy afternoon today, I'd be coming back in an ambulance with an IV of 3% saline. 

Y'know how people in Northern cities like Anchorage and Montreal and Toledo come out in droves in the springtime, squinting at the sun? And how all the great street festivals and so on are held in the summer? And how some people wear sweaters, even, after the sun goes down in the summer? 

Summer for us is like winter for them. We come out, squinting at the sun, in early October. Oktoberfests are huge here, partly because it's finally cool enough to dance again. We hang out all winter (with the exceptions of the two days it's really cold) and most of the spring, then go back inside in early June and stay there until the next cool front blows through on September 30th. 

Yow. I've grouched myself out. I have a sinus headache, four months of over-100* temperatures to look forward to, and I'll stop right here.

Meanwhile: does anybody have a house in, say, Portland that they'll be looking to sublet in late 2011?