"Sick" is practically "suck"

I've been home sick the past two days. This is not the "sick day" you remember, where you watch TV all day and every time you ring a bell your Mom brings you cheese or juice or soup. Nor is it Ferris Bueller's sick day, complete with sexy cars and a sexy girlfriend and a best friend who completely loses his nut. My sick days have been pretty sucky.

Yesterday I barely got out of bed, and my fever ran between 102-103 for most of the day. This morning, my fever was better, but my tonsils had all these icky white splotches on them. So I actually went to the doctor for a sore throat, for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long. Not having a primary care physician, I went to the Urgent Care facility associated with my OB/GYN's office.

The facility and the staff were fantastic, but there were a few decided differences from the doctor's office of my youth (which I loved!!). First, there is now an instant strep test. They do a regular throat culture, too, but the instant one responds, well, instantly... very reminiscent of a pregnancy test, actually, complete with a little blue line. When the doctor came in, I had my second surprise. She was younger than me. I've had relatively young doctors before, but I checked the website, and this doctor is definitely about three years my junior. That was funny... though I'm pretty sure the ratio only goes one way from here.

Apparently the germs didn't get the memo that I am no longer a teenager. Despite the instant test indicating I do not have strep throat, its 90% accuracy rating (meaning it misses one in 10 cases), combined with my nasty throat and fever, made my doctor pretty sure that the lab culture will come back positive. I started antibiotics in the hopes that this is the case. If my lab test comes back negative, however, there is a decent chance that I have mono. I am having trouble grasping the lameness of that possibility. Mono at age 33? Strep at 33 is bad enough, but MONO???