Immunity Challenge

I'm sick of Tennessee, I'm sick in Tennessee.  This summer has so far exceeded all others for days I've been sick while the weather is nice.  In mid May I came down with a soar throat and cough that persisted for over a week and led me to go to the campus clinic to get a Strep test.  Although the rapid Strep test (which only tests for strain A) came back negative, the doctor prescribed antibiotics anyway.  Sure enough, the soar throat and cough went away.  I took the pills for 10 days and finished off the prescription, then I got really sick.  Without going into too much graphic detail, I ended up going back to the doctor, getting blood and urine tests done and being told that Mono and Hepatitis were the two diseases that he though were most likely, but neither explained the bile in my urine.  For my time at the doctor's office, I got nothing but a bill and an appointment for next Wednesday to go over my liver function assay and possibly do more tests.  

The next day after that, my gums somehow got infected, then the sore throat came back and then just about everything went away.  I'm still not back to 100% health, but I feel much better, especially after two or three cups of coffee.  I feel like a human being again rather than a walking disease vector.

I suspect that the antibiotics were the cause of all the problems.  Possibly they disturbed the balance of my usually varied and hardy bacterial flora.  There were probably lots of very low concentration bacteria that performed specific jobs and kept each other in check as well as kept out new, competing pathogens.  Once one or two microbes were allowed to become dominant, they wrecked havoc on my body, and it wasn't been till now that my body is getting things back in check.  Clearly my body is just too fragile to handle modern medicine.