Today was the end of the 3rd week with this hoarse throat, so I got in to see a nurse practitioner. The University of Virginia Health System database did not list any throat issues as being side effects of Cefuroxime (Drugs.com specifically stated "hoarse throat.") She did a Strep swab "just in case," even thought I have no symptoms besides an irritated red throat. It came back very positive. We were both shocked. I got a script for antibiotics. I can't believe I lived with strep for 3 weeks. *sigh*
I was on Day 11 of an antibiotic for my kidney infection when I got my sore throat, although antibiotics are not all broad-spectrum. What sucks is that when this clears up, I'll have no excuse for my lack of motivation.
I am surprised that the cefuroxime did not get the strep. Strep is easy to kill. What did they give you for thee strep @John Brunner https://www.webmd.com/oral-health/understanding-strep-throat-treatment
What's just as odd is that I got strep 11 days into taking cefuroxime when the antibiotic was well-established in my system. (I took the final dose 3 days afterwards.) The other odd thing is that the my symptoms seemed to improve over the past 3 weeks. The first day or two my throat was drier than it has ever been. I mean it was as though I sucked down talcum powder. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and feel as though I could not breathe until I got a drink of water. (The humidity in my house is fine.) That subsided, and the soreness was moderately manageable with salt water gargles. Other than a sore throat, I had no other symptoms. The main reason the nurse practitioner gave me a strep test was the redness of my throat and to check the box before passing me off to an Ear/Nose/Throat guy (I was gonna seek an ENT guy on my own before I decided to go the my GP first.) The N.P. prescribed Amoxicillin. Yesterday's first dose rapidly took the edge off. She also told me to take Flonase, just to cover all bases.
Don't laugh too hard. We worked for years with the CDC concerning a Strep pneumoniae that was invasive, i.e., appeared in places other than the lungs like spinal fluid, inner ears, and blood. We have weird bacteria here because of the Bush healthcare system.
I probably shouldn't have capitalized the Bush, as it can get confused with the Bush family. We sometimes capitalize the rural areas of the state of Alaska. What I meant was the way healthcare is administered in rural Alaska. Each small village has one or more Health Aides who take care of the village. They are know to everyone in the village and are on call 24/7 365, and many of their patients are their relatives. Antibiotics are given out willy-nilly and people tend to "save the leftovers" when they start to feel better so they can take them for the next time they get sick, etc. rather than taking the full course of meds. When I was in the "bush", we had 5 antibiotic resistance patterns for E. coli and we could sometimes identify where the patient resided from the drugs the bug was resistant to.
That is not a good thing. I'm a little worried because of the variety of antibiotics I've been prescribed because of this UTI stuff, but none of those were broad-spectrum. They are all for UTI critters. So the risk is minimal. I'm a little worried about this strep appearing while I was on cefuroxime, and the symptoms being so mild. We'll see if the amoxicillin knocks it out.
Most Strep do not develop resistance readily. Staph can do it, but Strep doesn't usually do so. I cannot explain why a cephalosporin-type drug did not kill Strep.
I wanna know where I picked it up. The last time I got strep was in 2010 when an IHOP waitress came into work sick. I got leukoplakia on my vocal chords. (That's when I stopped smoking cigars.) I gotta tell the story of the ENT guy who shoved the camera up my nose & down my throat. We both watched the pics on his monitor. The guy had no way to capture reference pics, and for some reason he did not use his cell phone to take a pic of the monitor...so he got out a little notepad and his pencil, and drew an artist's rendition of the stuff on my vocal chords! The next time I went in, he shoved the camera in me, and we compared the image on the monitor to his prior drawing. "See! It's clearing up!!" I wanted to ask him if that was the antibiotics or his eraser that accomplished such a miracle.