Can Heroin Cure Strep?

I lost my health insurance when I lost my job.  I qualified for COBRA, but, like many people, found it to be too expensive.  As a healthy person with no on-going medical concerns or medications, the cost was too much to justify.  Unfortunately, since I've been unemployed, I've been sick more than in the last three years of my insurance-covered life combined.  It started with some sort of flu the weekend after I was laid off, then sniffles and a foggy head a few weeks after that, and for the last week has been a cold that, while generally abated, is still lingering in the form of a sore throat.  As tends to happen, The Beau has also been fighting various bugs and ailments.  After a particularly rough night last week, during which coughing kept both of us up, a scary word was whispered around the breakfast table; strep.  The Beau got a call from his sister saying both she and their mother were going in for strep tests.  Could our sore throats and exhaustion be, not just bad colds as we had assumed, but strep?  We jumped on webmd.com and found out that, left untreated, strep can lead quickly to scarlet and rheumatic fever or acute nephritis, all of which can be fatal.  However, it also says that strep is not accompanied by a runny nose (my big symptom) or coughing (his killer).  So we tried to do some difficult arithmetic.  Do we take a chance with dangerous, but unlikely, illnesses and ignore our symptoms, or do we play safe and head to the doctors for strep tests?  Without insurance, how much would a doctor visit cost?  And, if we did have strep and needed antibiotics, could we afford them?  Should we just try to get our hands on some antibiotics and take them without the tests, thereby certainly keeping ourselves from death by rheumatic fever, but potentially furthering the evil missions of bacteria to become the dominant creatures on the planet?  And how exactly can one get antibiotics without a prescription?

We spend close to an hour weighing options, a conversation made all the more difficult by sleep deprivation and the general spaciness of illness.  Eventually we come to an uneasy conclusion- we would wait for his mother's and sister's strep tests to come back.  If they have strep, we'd go see a doctor, get the tests and antibiotics, and figure out how to afford it later, while we enjoyed not dying of kidney failure brought on by acute nephritis.  As I headed to the kitchen to make more tea (these would be about our sixth cups of the morning), Beau pointed out that it would be easier for us to get our hands on heroin than antibiotics.  My fever-addled brain misunderstood his intent.

"Really?  Do you think that'll help?  Can heroin kill bacteria? "

He stared at me for a minute.  "I was making a comment on our heath care system, not a suggestion."

"Oh."

The tests came back- no strep.  It looked like there would be no need for antibiotics.  Or heroin, for that matter.  Over the next few days, our symptoms seemed to subside mostly, and, while neither of us is perfectly healthy, I'm no longer worried that I will make like Beth in Little Women. Which is nice.