Look, I don’t want to scare you but please, please go see your doctor! I was like you when I was young. I caught every single infection or illness known to mankind. If someone in the class got sick, so did I. I had chicken pox TWICE and it was so bad that I had to be hospitalized both times. I had allergies to all sorts of stuff: citrus fruit, tomatoes, strawberries. For years they thought it was all just unrelated shit and coincidences. It wasn’t until I developed painful sores in my mouth and started losing hair and had a low white blood cell count at the same time that they really took the time to figure out what was going on. It turns out that I had an autoimmune disease.

They are a lot more common than a lot of people think. While you’re still sick, if you have health insurance, you might want to specifically ask to be tested for lupus. If they don’t run the tests while you’re sick then it may not be diagnosable until the next time you’re really ill.

I know some folks might call this paranoia but, given the fact that I am the girl who developed a disease that only crops up in one out of every ten million people, you might want to consider the fact that it’s always SOMEONE who is included in those icky disease statistics and that someone might be YOU.

If you run out of pain before you run out of Vicodin and want to keep what’s left around for emergencies, take a jar that seals well, put about 1/2 inch of calcium chloride in the bottom (the round beads that you spread on driveways to melt ice/snow, not regular sodium chloride that looks like crystals), put the pill bottle in there, seal it up good, and put it in the freezer. You can then disregard the expiration date - it’ll keep for years.

Radfem:

Regarding your comment on antibiotics denuding your body of beneficial flora, there was a recent study (I don’t have the link) which proposes that the human organism has retained the appendix because it provides a reservoir of beneficial microbes that are resistant to GI disease due to their compartmentalization and that then enables more rapid re-colonization of the gut.

Take heart, you’ll probably get properly acclimated to Iowa after this winter.

Meanwhile, I must admit I’m susceptible to canker sores myself. When all else fails, and I need a good night’s sleep, I sip a little brandy, being careful to roll each sip around to all the sores. It isn’t particularly pleasant, but the resulting numbness lasts until I’m well asleep, and the quantity of alcohol is not sufficient to disrupt my sleep. Sleep = good.

Get well soon!

With canker sores, it can be a blip in the immune system and/or sensitivities to certain foods like strawberries and chocolate for example. I used to get this wierd burning tongue on fire type thing w/o sores and eventually traced it to eating a jumbo hot dog from one particular stand.

But dozens of sores at one time, especially after strep (assuming the somewhat rare scarlett fever wasn’t involved) needs to be checked out. Canker sores are one of the big mysteries of medicine in terms of why they happen.

Antibiotics especially general spectrum can wipe out every trace of bacteria in your body which can cause huge problems in the mouth b/c there’s both “good” and “bad” there and it’s often the “good” that takes a beating. One antibiotic gave me huge mouth and throat pain but no sores, for example.

Hope you feel better soon!

When I moved to Atlanta, I started getting constant ear infections. I don’t know if it was the pollen (which the wind would sweep into huge piles in parking lots), or something else in the air, or because I was miserable there. They cleared up immediately when I left.

Wtf, the exact same thing happened to me when I first moved to Atlanta. I was told it was ’swimmer’s ear’, and I’d certainly been swimming outdoors enough. Though that was in cehmically treated back-garden pools, and I’m used to swimming in wild water. I move back to Atlanta in a couple of months, too. :/

Yep, that’s a classic reason for a sudden increase in number of infections. Moving, that is, not moving from Iowa to California in particular. Still worth getting things checked out, though.

I got checked out for a bunch of stuff last summer, though, and nearly everything was normal. I spent most of my childhood and teenage years sick — my immune system has always sort of been out to lunch. During the 5 years or so I was in college, I did better, but I’ve sort of assumed my new susceptibility is because I’ve moved to Iowa from California and have no resistance to the new bugs.

The doctor gave me a lidocaine mouthwash which made things worse for a little while, but then seems to be working now.

You have my sympathies, too — I hope you soon no longer need the orajel!