A tale of two bacteria, and one bad sandwich

That's because I didn't tell anybody. Thanks to the magic of technology, I can maintain the illusion of being well, happy, and not in the hospital while laying in a bed in a room where I never really know whether it's day or night. (Of course, it would help if I managed to update while I was there.)

Besides, I wasn't all that sick.

I had (have, I should say) a whopper of a UTI featuring Candida and Enterococcus. Actually that's Vancomycin resistant Enterococcus. When they told me initially that I had VRE, I thought that somehow the Virginia Rail Express had diverted through my bladder, and I was surprised, to say the least.

So I'm here to beg all of you not to overuse antibiotics. If you are prescribed an antibiotic by a harried PCP, ask somebody, maybe a nurse, if this is the best treatment, and if there isn't a way to treat your specific illness without antibiotics.

How will you know? OK, here's a hint. Generally, a physician should know what bacteria is causing the problem before prescribing anything. To identify a bacteria, you have to send off a test, which is usually a culture of some bodily fluid.

Now, doctors are as good as anybody as knowing that in some situations it is very easy to predict what the result of a culture is going to be before they actually see them. On one hand, you ought to be able to trust your doctors. On the other hand, I've had my antibiotics switched because somebody prescribed without checking the test results. So ask to see your test results, for one thing.

It is not that hard for you to learn what bugs react to what drugs. I've had to. Maybe you could take a little of the brain space that now holds TV theme songs from the 1970s and the whole plot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from beginning to end and use it to learn a little bit about pharmacology.

And I'm not going into why the proliferation of anti-bacterial products are so bad for the ecosystem, but they are not helping our fight against bad bacteria that cause disease.

(I'm also not going into the antibiotics that we get through the food we eat, which is an extremely frightening topic that I don't want to think too much about lest I become one of those people who eats nothing but brown rice and tofu.)

Anyway, there is one drug out there that will fight antibiotic resistant bacteria. One. I've taken it four or five times now, and I couldn't afford it if I didn't have insurance.

The thing is, even normal well people get antibiotic resistant bacteria, and they have just as hard a time treating them. So let's do everybody a favor... lay off the antibiotics.

Anyway, I had the worst sandwich today: a cheese and tomato panini that would have been wonderful except that somebody decided to sprinkle the tomato with whole peppercorns. Surprise! I think the thing would have been fine without them.

before - after