An excerpt from Douglas Coupland, “Oxy!”:

So I was in Atlanta.  I checked into the hotel, a nice place, but my room, upon entering, was a dank meat locker. I looked around for the thermostat but I couldn’t find one, and I went to open the windows and they were sealed shut. So I asked the front desk how to make the room slightly less frozen and was told: ‘We keep all rooms at a consistent temperature. Guests seem to prefer it this way.’ I figured, what can possibly go wrong sleeping a few nights in a room like this?

By my third morning I have a cough: hack-hack. The next morning, my last at the hotel, the hack-hack has turned into a deep cough-cough. As the week progressed elsewhere in Georgia, the cough turned into bronchitis, and I could feel foamy bubbles percolating in my lungs when I lay down to sleep. Yes, there’s nothing sexier than wheezing, a bodily function seemingly designed to remind us all that death lurks around every corner. Finally, I dragged myself to a local medical clinic, and this is when things got really American.

You know where this is going…

[The doctor] returned a few minutes later with some filled-out prescription forms. “I’m going to give you a course of antibiotics. Take one a day in the morning with food. Just one.”

“OK.”

“And here’s a prescription for oxycodone. Take two a day.”

“Oxycodone?” It felt weirdly glamorous to be getting some oxy for the first time.

“Yes. It’s a terrific cough suppressant.”

Note:  Mr. Coupland is Canadian so the whole experience of dealing with the American health care system is new to him.

So I started taking the antibiotics and . . . nothing happened. The bronchitis remained and, if anything, got a bit worse. With the oxy, though, it was different: let it be said here that life is truly great when you’re taking oxycodone. It really is. Annoying people stop being annoying. Repetitive tasks become engrossing. Writing and creative work become euphoric.

And then it turns on you.

It turned on me around Day Six. I woke up and the back of my skull felt like it had a skeleton hand with long, pointy fingernails clasping on to it. Of course, the only way to unclasp it was . . . more oxy.

Time passes…

By Day Nine the bronchitis was morphing into pneumonia, and pretty much 50 per cent of my cognitive output was based around analysing my bodily sensations and trying to figure out if they were real or psychosomatic but, either way, the only way to unclasp The Hand at the back of my skull was to take another [oxycodone] pill…

More time passes…

I returned to Canada, where my doctor looked at my prescriptions, puzzled. First, my antibiotic: “Your Florida doctor prescribed you this? … We used to give this to two-year-olds and, even then, for your body weight, this ought to have been at least three times a day at quadruple strength.”

A discussion with doctor re the treatment regime he was prescribed in Florida suggests that the doctor who saw him and the pharmacist who filled his prescription might not have had his best interests at heart.  He receives a prescription for antibiotics to treat his pneumonia from his doctor:

Within 48 hours, my pneumonia essentially vanished thanks to two azithromycin tablets. But it took almost a week for The Hand to permanently unclasp itself from my skull. Now that the experience is over, I feel as if I’d driven through a speed trap in a small Ozark town and had been at the mercy of the local Boss Hogg.  All of this because of bronchitis. What if I’d had something bigger than mere bronchitis? What bigger and scarier speed traps would await me or you or anyone else down the US medical road?

If you can’t access Coupland’s post at FT.com then Brad DeLong has excerpts.