Goodie Gumdrops! Now we’ve got a new flu epidemic revving up. And the authorities expect it to be particularly bad in Colorado. That’s just across the state line… 😉
Seriously: if we have a flu epidemic in Colorado, we’ll have it here in lovely (adjacent!) Arizona. Tourists will bring it across the state line, and it undoubtedly will spread across the Reservation, too.
Not like I wasn’t already sick as a dawg, eh?
Seriously: I’m inclined to doubt that I’ll survive a really roaring case of the flu just now. Always have been preternaturally susceptible to respiratory infections — when I was a kid, one evening a doctor told my mother I wouldn’t survive until morning.
Huh. He seems to have been wrong about that. Unless I’m a ghost, eh?
Truth to tell, though, respiratory infections do make me sicker than they do most people. What you think is a cold or a mild case of flu will lay me low for three weeks. And that I would like to avoid just now, what with this current mildly terrifying ailment.
Ugh. I can remember those awful brats in grade school teasing and tormenting me because my mother would keep me home whenever I caught a respiratory infection. GOD, but those kids in Ras Tanura were monsters!!! I learned to hate them even when they weren’t actively tormenting me — most of the time I’d just stay away from the other kids.
This was good, in a weird way, because it gave me plenty of time to study. Hence, lo! those many years later: Phi Beta Kappa. But…I think I would rather have had a few friends than a decorative fake key. 😀
***
So, soooo sick. The peripheral neuropathy, while apparently not especially dangerous, is absolutely crazy-making! To the extent that, as ailments go, it might actually be “dangerous,” it’s because much more of this would indeed make you suicidal.
No, don’t panic, please! I’m not about to throw myself off the North Rim. Yet. But I sure can see how, if this goes on and on and on, a person would be mightily tempted to bring an end to it. It hurts.
And so I hurt constantly. If there were any way to stop it, I’d be inclined to try that way…even if it meant an end to life. An end to life, after all, means an end to pain.
And please: spare me the advice to take an aspirin or an ibuprofen. Both those nostrums — especially aspirin — cause peripheral neuropathy in me.
No kidding. Take an aspirin, and within half an hour or so, it’s bzzzzzzzz…
Yes, I will use aspirin. But only if I’m in a lot of pain. With the peripheral neuropathy lurking at all times, I figure one of those OTC pills will aggravate the hell out of it. And one thing I do not need to do is to make this buzzing and tingling and burning worse!
Stop the World!
I Wanna Get Off!
