In early December (yes, I'm well aware that it's now the end of March), Matt thought it would be fun to get food poisoning the night before a scavenger hunt at Disneyland. I ended up going with our only other teammate, so we had to make due with second place. Matt's map reading skills would have assured us first.

A few days later, I suddenly got very sick, complete with explosions out both ends. Because Matt was still weak from his bout of food poisoning, he caught whatever delightful bug that I presumably brought home from Disneyland. For about two weeks, we laid on the couch occasionally ordering delivery food when one of us could muster the energy to use the computer. It got to the point where we admitted we had to cancel our trip to Las Vegas.

Since we weren't going on our trip, we decided that we were damn well going to the doctor that day. Being a Sunday, the only places open were various Doc-in-a-Box™ clinics. Matt selected the nearest and least skeevy one, and off we went for proper medical advice. The clinician we saw, who shall henceforth be known as Dr. Idiot, did not give me any antibiotics because he was worried they would further disrupt my already impaired digestive tract. Dr. Idiot gave Matt cough medicine with codeine and prednisone and no antibiotics either because reasons. He also suggested that Matt stop coughing. Shockingly, neither of us got any better. In fact, we got worse.

A few days later, Matt was coughing so badly he literally couldn't drive. After Matt pulled over, I called our real doctor, Dr. Internist, from the car. He had some choice words with which to describe Dr. Idiot. He also had a proper prescription pad and order forms for chest X-rays. He determined that, from lack of proper intervention, our weakened immune systems had allowed us to both develop secondary bacterial infections. I was "lucky" to only have bronchitis, whereas Matt had full-blown pneumonia. Dr. Internist gave us proper medication, which thankfully kept Matt out of the emergency room. After a few more days, we finally started feeling better.

Then I started to go crazy. Literally.

As it turns out, methylprednisolone has a possible side effect of mood and behavior changes, especially when combined with an SSRI. Let's just say things did not go well, and Matt ended up calling both Dr. Psychiatrist and Dr. Internist. For future reference, I will not be taking that medicine ever again. Dr. Internist switched me to a different medicine with less crazy involved. A few weeks later, I was finally better. Oh yeah, Matt recovered too, though he had a lingering cough for nearly a month afterwards.