Penicillin Rocks!

On Monday of this week, I was about as cheerful as a 65-year-old, single, overweight, working grandmother is likely to get. My job was busy and interesting, my hair was looking good, I'd weighed in at Weight Watchers some 5+ lbs lighter and had enjoyed two great mornings with the grandtwins over the previous weekend. Good times!

By Tuesday morning, I was as sick as I can remember being in 50 years: weak, scared, hurting, feverish, slightly delusional and hopeless. A cunning one-two punch of strep throat and shingles with a chaser of guilt about staying home sick

Thank you, Alexander Fleming, for noticing what happened when some mold grew on one of your petri dishes filled with gram-positive bacteria in 1928. Thanks to Ernst Chain, Howard Florey and Norman Heatley who each contributed to the lengthy R&D phase of extracting, producing and stabilizing industrial quantities of Fleming's discovery, penicillin.

TIME magazine called penicillin "the most efficacious, life-saving drug in the world." Shout out to TIME -- this stuff is ferocious!

And thank god for bringing me down with a bacteria, and a gram-positive one at that.

It's now Friday. Hair isn't quite up to Monday's standard. I'm not energized, but I'm functioning. I'm not despairing. I can look forward to things to come. Off to work, thanks to Alexander, Ernst, Howard and Norman -- my guys.