Scared pigless

My nose is dripping and my knuckles feel swollen.  It must be the swine flu.    I bet I am going to keel over and die any minute now.  Yahoo News says so, as does MSNBC, The New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Obama administration and my mother.

- "What is going on?" she says in our weekly phone call.  "The TV says Texas is infected.  I've been worried sick about you." 

It's my mom's job to worry about me.  She's been very good at it for many years.  It's my job to reassure her about my predicted longevity.  I rattle the facts: two confrimed cases in a state of twenty million people, stockpiles of antiviral medicine, state-of-the-art hospitals.  What are the chances?

- "Wash your hands," she says with her first-grade teacher voice.  "And don't anywhere near people."

I don't remind her that I share an office bathroom with sixty other women, that the only way to get food is the supermarket, that the daily Starbucks trip is still a must and that I can't afford to stay home all day.  I'm going to have to take a chance like everybody else.  If the flu hits our house, I'll have to call the doctor's office early instead of letting things take their course as I did this winter.  With a bit of luck, we'll get the medication we need and all of us will survive.  The alternative is too unthinkable to consider.

First the hurricane, then the economic crisis, now the pandemic: is this a test of our wills?  Did we really need something else to toss and turn about at night? 

I am tired of scary news.  Now would be a grand time for exhuberant good news, a wild celebration of life maybe,  a spoonful of sparkle.  I've already bought my party hat.  I'm ready.

Comments

[D.]

I love your swine flu photo - and I'm ready for some exuberant, over the top good news as well!