Joining the drug culture...

I'm not given to gorging on drugs of any kind, give or take the odd Strepsil when I feel a strep throat coming on. I don't even ever take headache tablets.

And I gave up ganga after some delusionary hash cookies in Hamburg left me seeing traffic lights as flowers on the roadside, and smoking the stuff in Sydney in the early 'Seventies made me loose the thread of what I was saying in mid-sentence - not a good feeling for a journalist, so I stopped doing that, too.

In view of this almost total abstinence (wine is an honourable exception), the past few weeks make me feel like a bit of an addict :-)

Since early October, when I developed a lung infection and an ear infection during a particularly bad bout of 'flu, I've consumed a 10-day supply of Augmentin Duo Forte, each tablet of the antibiotic packing 850 mg plus 150 mg of active constituents.

I had barely swallowed the last of the antibacterial cluster bombs last Tuesday when my throat/lung irritation and slight cough flared up and pierced my chest with pain. By Friday, I was sufficiently worried to revisit my local GP. After sitting in his tiny blast-cooled waiting room for an hour, I was waved into his tiny blast-cooled consulting room. (The air-conditioning alone was in my view a very efficient means of distributing my SARS, bird 'flu or whatever contagious stuff I had picked up at that unfortunate lunch when my son-in-law coughed straight at me, so I asked the receptionist to turn it off.)

The medico professed surprise at developments, and suggested a different antibiotic, Kalixocin, in dual 250 mg doses a day for a full week. He also prescribed an expensive cortison inhaler gadget on the off chance that I might be suffering from asthma. And for good measure, he handed me a referral to a nearby pathology lab for a chest X-ray, to "check for structural damage" in the lungs of this long-reformed former light smoker...

I picked up the Swedish-made Symbicort Turbuhaler dispenser (normal price $A55, under Medicare pharmaceutical benefits just $A4.60) and the Kalixocin ($A16 RRP, $A4.60 under Medicare) at the well-stocked beachside pharmacy, hoping no-one had invoked the name of Kali for a reason...

At home, I studied the patient information leaflet for the inhaler (there was none with the Kalixocin), but it contained mainly information on how to operate the gadget. Undeterred, I googled for AstraZeneca, checked out their various sites for the drug budesonide and was intrigued to discover that "concomitant administration of...clarithromycin (my Kali stuff), ...(etc)... may increase the systemic exposure to budesonide."

I had earlier decided not to take the inhaler stuff while taking antibiotics, because it seemed to me that one should test the one possibility first before trying the other option. But perhaps my GP will explain that the higher systemic exposure didn't mean anything as far as I was concerned.

So far, I remain in the multiple hands of Kali, and halfway through the seven-day course I feel subjectively better. Some coughing remains, particularly in the morning and evening, and I feel as if I still have some painful spots in the wings of my lungs. Isaac wouldn't have infected me with TB, by any chance?

Or is our hovel infested with strange fungi? Come to think of it, bats have spent a night or two inside perhaps six months ago. And then there are those lovable chickens that I cuddle...

Ah, well... it will all come out in the wash! I still hope to wind my way back to Worringen next May when I turn 70, to look for information about my 5G grandfather, a farmer and breeder of farmers. My son would love to hear that!

Cheers for now.