Tuberculosis is, as diseases go, moderately chic. After all, this was the disease that brought down Doc Holliday, and how many cool lines did he have in Tombstone? I thought of myself, at work, dying of TB, sweating, pale and still amazingly glib. "The photog says the transmitter in the live truck is dead?" I'd say, in between fits of coughing up blood. "It would appear that the strain was more than he could bear."

The reality was: I had pneumonia, and a really bad case of it. Somehow the disease had slipped incognito into my left lung and taken up residence sometime on a Friday or Saturday, when I went from moderately tired to flattened by fever. I suddenly found myself burning up, rosy-cheeked, sweating and highly confused as I laid down on my couch. Ten hours later, without having moved, I decided that trying to sit in an upright position would be a waste of my time. So, I lurched myself up, took some Goody's Headache Powder, crawled into bed, and proceeded to soak my sheets in sweat.

That Monday, I decided that my regimen of sweating, Advil and powder was not working correctly, and I went to the doctor. I rarely visit the urgent care anywhere, just because I tend to go when the worst is over. "So, you had a bad fever," the nurse would often say, as she denoted my horrible fever of 99.3 degrees. "And your throat was hurting, and you were seeing spots."

Then the doctor would come in, see that I had symptoms that even a six-year-old child wouldn't complain about, say I was probably going to be ok, and give me a prescription just to make sure the sickness would go away completely. “Here,” he might say. “Take this prescription for seven days worth of sugar pills, wuss, and come back when one of your kidneys stops working.”

So, as I sat on that weird half-bed on the exam room, on top of that crinkly paper, I was taken by surprise when I took a deep breath, and the doctor said, "Huh. Do that again."

"Well," he said, pulling his stethoscope out from his ears. "There's definitely something going on inside your left lung. Tell me again what your symptoms are?"
Once again, I repeated what I'd told him earlier: fever, coughing, acute laziness, desire to watch infomercials.

The doctor got a little more somber once my x-ray came back. "Close the door," he said, as he sat suspiciously far away from me, rested his elbows on his legs and started to tell me that he had absolutely no explanation for what was in my lung.

Actually, that's not true. He did. "I'm looking at your x-ray here, and, well, this thing you've got at the top of your left lung here isn't what we normally see in folks that have pneumonia, and well-- hey, quick question have you ever been to prison?"

Apparently, serving prison time was a precursor to whatever deadly disease had decided to strike me down in the prime of my life. "It's just that, well, what you have is, and I don't want you to be nervous or anything," he said, making me nervous, "but, I just don't know where you would have gotten this from. I mean, do you hang out in nursing homes?"

Then as a new possibility, he busted out the big TB.

Things got a lot more serious after that. The same nurse who hadn't even flinched through my coughing fits five minutes ago came back in wearing a full-fledged Michael Jackson SARS mask.

"Oh, it's just a precaution," she said, as she avoided eye contact. Of course, if I actually had tuberculosis, she'd be the carrier. After all, I'd already filled up the room with my horrible death spores when she'd come in the first time. "It's true, you are a good woman," I wanted to say in my best Holliday. "Then again, you may be the antichrist."

Apparently, tuberculosis is a very dangerous disease that I'd thought was eradicated years ago. Maybe all this time it'd been hanging out with polio and scurvy, plotting a comeback that, in some twisted way, involved showing up in my lung and causing me to sweat through all the nice things I owned. The doctor explained to me that if I had it, I'd probably get over it, after six months of treatment and registration with the health department. This worried me. Not so much the half-year of medical attention, but the mandatory journeys to the Hippocratic equivalent of the DMV.

Also, I had to wait 48 hours to find out if I actually had TB. "Oh no, you can’t go back to work," the doctor said. "As far as I'm concerned, you're contagious." At that moment, I wanted to ask him if he had some sort of giant plastic bubble I could use to freak out fellow employees. In lieu of that question however, I decided to start another coughing fit.

I went back home and waited, and while I waited, took enough prescription antibiotics to stop the Ebola virus in its tracks. I prayed somebody would call me to ask me how I was doing. I'd then cough and reply, "I'm dying, how are you."

I sat around for the better part of three days, coming up with tuberculosis stories. "This one time I had tuberculosis," I saw myself telling my grandkids one day. "I remember it well. My fingernails turned green and my hair melted and my blood transmogrified itself into motor oil. That was a rough time. They cast me down to live with the folks who had the measles. They figured that wussy disease might be destroyed whole by the power of my TB."

It turns out, I didn't have TB, which was a disappointment. It was like telling Doc Holliday that what he really had was just a bad case of the sniffles. Your sweating, Doc? That's just from the humidity.

Still, every brush with a health problem should make you realize how good you have it when you're not sick. Sure, I was looking forward to fully taking advantage of a tuberculosis-free life in a few days. Once I got there, I went back to drinking beer, obeying the 5 second rule and forgetting to wash my hands again. That's just me. It appears my hypocrisy knows no bounds.