It's amazing what a quick visit to the doctor will do when you're just starting to get sick. Fall semester of '03, I decided that I didn't need to see the doctor when I got sick. He was my Greek professor, and my roommate's dad (Dionysusigma's dad), so it would have taken absolutely no effort to just get it fixed, but I was going to tough it out. Two weeks later, Dionysusigma was driving me to his dad's office.
Nasty little upper respiratory bug was keeping me from breathing (and the cigarettes weren't helping), I had about a 102 fever, and I mentioned to the doc that my ears hurt. He stuck the endoscope in there and said "Whoa! That's because they're infected... REALLY infected. My God! can you even hear out of this ear?" Turns out that I was even deaf-er than usual in that ear.
So, a couple shots of some horribly caustic antibiotic (my arm hurt for about three days), a week of some fairly powerful oral antibiotic, and an albuterol inhaler, and I could get up and move around for long enough to go to class. I am now under orders to visit the doc if I so much as think that I've got a breathing problem. Evidently haing pneumonia once increases your probability of contracting it again. Doc told me that another couple of days, and I would've been in the hospital for awhile.
And one five-minute consultation with him or any other doctor, which would have cost about $5 on our insurance, would have ended the problem on the third day. Taking the "tough guy" attitude to being sick is just about the most idiotic thing you can possibly do.