School is not going very well for me. I went from two weeks before school, with absolutely nothing urgent to do, just sitting around and surfing on the internet, to band camp the day after, eleven hours of marching around on the grass in the August heat.

Looking back, that wasn't so bad. Compared to my Junior year of school, of course. All my classes are honors classes, and only one is easy (Band 4 Honors), though it makes up for that with the time required (marching season=I give up Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays). My entire schedule consists of Trig/Precalc Honors, English 11 Honors, AP Chem, AP Physics (yes, I'm doubling up in sciences…is it hard? Do you even need to ask?), French 4 Honors ("Madame, je ne comprends pas…"), and AP US History.

What's better, is during the two weeks of band camp I kept sneezing every five seconds ("Band, atten-HUT!" "A-CHOO!" "Dress-center-dress!" "A-CHOO!" "Ready, front!" "A-CHOO!" "Taking it seven sets to letter B of Movement 1. Set!" "A-CHOO!"). Allergies. It was never this bad before though. Usually I could shrug it off.

My sneezing fits got better once we moved to the lower field, which was made of Astroturf. But I only got a few days' rest. First week of school, I first came down with a fever, then lost my voice. It hurt to laugh. How pathetic is that?

And then the week after that, after my fever went away and I got my voice back, I started to have coughing fits. Deep, throaty coughs that lasted several seconds at a time and got worse to the point of hurting my throat and lungs. Sneezing, I could understand before, but these coughing fits had never happened before.

My dad said it was probably some sort of lung disease. "Emphysema, maybe. Bronchitis." Ridiculous. These were all diseases that smokers got. And I wasn't a smoker. The symptoms also didn't match.

Of course, being the miser he is, my dad decided to wait a week. "It might go away," he said. "No sense in going to the doctor and wasting about a hundred bucks. Plus the oil money. It could be just allergies."

Okay. I waited. It got worse. Yesterday during band practice we did the usual lap around the track. My lungs started burning when I couldn't get enough air, and after the lap I started coughing so hard my stomach actually heaved with the cough. I had to sit out of practice.

So today my dad took me to the doctor's office. The doctor did the check-ups, and then announced, "Allergies."

Just allergies. "But it's never happened before," I said. He shrugged.

"The mucus in your body has clogged up in your throat, making breathing hard and causing all those coughs." Then he gave me boxes of medicine. We went home.

I'm still coughing, and it still hurts, but at least I know it's not something serious anymore. It's just allergies. I hope.

-BCE, signing off

EDIT: My thanks to Black Six for helping to clear up my duplicate blog entry problem.