My grandma's sister died of pneumonia. I don't know the year, though my understanding was that it came less than a year before penicillin treatments became widely available in the late 1930s. Or maybe it was less than a year before the discovery of penicillin's antibiotic properties in 1929. The latter rings truer for me, but since I can't even remember my great-aunt's name, I have no confidence as to the actual facts.

What is true is that pharmacies keep vast vats of "pink stuff" (which includes one derivative or another of penicillin) on hand. When my oldest son Max got his one and only ear infection a couple years ago, a 10-day supply of the stuff was three bucks and change--well below our co-pay. Penicillin is powerful, versatile and inexpensive--one of the greatest human discoveries of all time, even if it is a common mold.

I wasn't thinking about any of that last Tuesday, however, as I watched my four-month-old son Sam working hard just to breathe. He'd had a cold for three days, and usually that means things are starting to turn around. Indeed, he'd been chipper and playful on Monday. Even the fever was gone. But by early Tuesday afternoon, the fever came back and Sam wasn't interested in playing or watching his surroundings. All he wanted to do was breathe.

His chest heaved and his nostrils flared. Over and over. Too tired to do anything else (even take a nap), Sam just lay on our bed and breathed. When he didn't even flinch as Max and his friend Alex crashed around the house making all manner of loud noises, I knew it was time to call the doctor.

Or, as often happens in our medical system, I called the "nurse advice line." It was getting on in the afternoon, and the nurse had a problem finding space for him at one of the three locations for our practice. Then she consulted with a doctor, who advised that we go either to the emergency room or an urgent care center so that Sam could have an x-ray.

The unspoken word, of course, was pneumonia. And all I knew about pneumonia was that my grandma's sister died from it. I was gung-ho about getting an x-ray. Sam needs an x-ray? Let's go get it!

So after Alex went home, Sam, Max and I trucked over to the urgent care center, getting there around four. A doctor finally saw us a little before six, and she said that she thought she heard something in Sam's right lung, but she wasn't sure. She decided to perform an albuterol breathing treatment--asthma inhalers contain albuterol sulfate, if that helps--in the hopes of clearing up his lungs. Anyway, the treatment didn't do squat. So the doctor said Sam needed an x-ray, and that we had to go to the emergency room to get it.

I protested. We'd come to the urgent care center in the express hopes of avoiding the E.R. But the doctor explained that the x-ray machine (or maybe it was the radiologist) at the urgent care center couldn't be used with kids under the age of three. I groaned. Nearly three hours gone, and all we had to show for it was a cranked up baby who couldn't breathe.

Remembering the last trip to the E.R. with Sam, I arranged for Max to spend the night at Alex's house. And I called Barbara, who was in eastern North Carolina covering a story. After picking up a few things at home (just in case we needed to spend the night) I hauled Sam into the E.R.

First, a visit with the triage desk (which was useless, as all pediatric patients were called back at the same time, regardless of injury or length of time in the waiting room). Then two calls from Barbara. As I was hustling to get over to the desk for the second call, I failed to strap Sam into his car seat. That wouldn't have been a problem, except that the carrying arm wasn't locked into position. So when I picked up the car seat, it immediately turned over, plopping Sam headfirst onto the hard waiting room floor.

He probably fell about a foot, and he had small bruises on his right cheek and forehead. The collective gasp of the folks in the waiting room shamed me to no end. On the whole, though, the fall was a plus. It scared me into willing myself awake (I'd been going on two or three hours of sleep a night for a couple nights and was decidedly groggy after sitting in the steamy waiting room for nearly two hours) and the shock of the impact seemed to wake Sam up as well. He started crying (Yes! Signs of life!) and then after I finished the phone call, he ate for the first time since eight that morning. A full meal, too.

After hours of waiting, we went back to be seen by a doctor--the head of the pediatric E.R., as it turns out. As we talked, he and I played a game. I related the events of last December, and he tried to guess what the doctors did next. In this way, I came to confirm exactly what I believed at the time: Every single doctor who saw Sam back in December screwed up to a significant degree. Ah well. The kid lived. And that is the most important thing.

Sam got his x-ray a little before eleven, and Barbara arrived at the hospital soon after. Sam ate again, and we waited for the results. We waited quite a while. Finally, the doctor came by and said that he heard a little something in Sam's right lung and that Sam's x-ray wasn't quite normal (Sam did have a cold, after all), but that he didn't see any pneumonia. He sent us home, telling us to go to our practice in the morning and--you guessed it--see another doctor.

Luckily, Max goes to pre-school on Wednesdays, so I was able to navigate the doctor's office with just Sam. The doctor (not our regular doctor) listened to Sam's chest. He looked over the charts detailing nearly twelve hours of testing and waiting. He grumbled.

"I don't need an x-ray. I hear something in his right lung. I would diagnose this as pneumonia." He pulled out his prescription pad and wrote out a note for amoxicillin. "Take this twice a day for ten days. If he's not better in a couple days, come back in. Your boy will be just fine."

Then it hit me: The worse-case scenario in all this was...penicillin? Just like last December, we ran up untold health care bills unnecessarily. Yeah, our portion of the bill won't be that much (maybe a hundred or two hundred bucks at most), but the amount billed to the system was certainly more than a thousand dollars, and probably closer to two. All that just to score some of the cheapest drugs on the planet?

I realize that antibiotics are overprescribed, and that doctors try to take great care to avoid fostering the growth of drug-resistant "superbugs." But when a four-month-old has a persistent cold and you hear something in one of his lungs, it seems to me that should be enough. An x-ray wasn't necessary. No one believed that Sam was particularly sick--apart from the cold and the breathing problems, he was obviously a healthy boy. Pneumonia was the worst-case diagnosis. And that worst case meant ten days of the pink stuff. Period. If I'd known that on Tuesday, I would have insisted on getting in to our practice's office that afternoon, even if a doctor had to stay a couple minutes after five. That would have saved me some sleep, Barbara the hassle of abandoning her assignment and Sam an unnecessary knock on the head.

There was one irony: The doctor consulted by the nurse at the beginning of this big mess was the same one who sent Sam to the hospital unnecessarily back in December. She's the one who insisted on an x-ray. This is twice she's sent us to the hospital for no good reason. It's time she learned about the practical side of medicine, preferably from the crusty old doctor we saw Wednesday morning. I have no doubt he'll set her straight.

Oh, and yes, the amoxicillin cleared up Sam's breathing almost immediately. He's still got a bit of a cold (the antibiotics don't help with that), but otherwise he's fine. Just another overtreated American.

Jon Worley was going to write about what it felt to turn 35 on Friday. Then he realized he did, anyway.