Disease of the Month

So it looks like I’m not going to die, at least not today, or if it is today it won’t be from swine flu.

I was on the El in West Philly yesterday and a woman was talking to a man across the aisle from her and she declared to him loudly and thus to the rest of the car load of people, that swine flu was over and there was no longer any need for us to worry about it and that some man without a Green Card had brought it into the US and that he had been found and everything was Ok now. Thank God for bureaucracy and racists; they will explain away all the ills of the world with their inane theories.

However racism didn’t explain the hacking and sneezing and the worrying that I had gone through last week. Well I didn’t actually worry, not openly at least. It didn’t explain why I thought that everyone else who decided to cough or sneeze while not even trying to cover up figured they could to do it in my presence whether they were black or white or anything in between. Nor did it explain my burning desire to give them a swift kick in the nuts and give them a real reason to cough, but I digress. Racism also doesn’t explain why the number of infections keeps rising around the world but unless you live in Mexico, that doesn’t seem to be that big a deal by the press. Nor does it really explain the constant head pounding that I’ve been going through for the last few weeks, but we’ll go into that later.

I think that when I write the story of my life and all the trials that I have gone through, the chapters involving illnesses and near death experiences will need at least one chapter all to itself. And I’m not even talking about the hospitalizations that had as a child. The stomach thing that I had two weeks old, or the pneumonia at two years old or the appendicitis flare up at eight or the broken limbs that get as a child or even the cancer scare a few years ago when I thought to myself, “So this is how it’s going to be... where are my cigarettes?”

What I will talk about will be the time when I battled SARS or bird flu and when someone sneezed in the food court near where I worked while I was buying Chinese food and I had to run out of there for my life and well being. I've never been proud of that moment, but I can't take it back Then there was the time that the West Nile Virus was coming down from New York and each time I took a shower I would have to lotion my body and follow it with a good dose of mosquito repellent. It was last year I think when I got bit by a tick on the inside of my knee from being in the back yard or doing some shit I shouldn’t have doing in grassland somewhere. I could still see the bite marks two weeks later and I thought this was it. This time I really believed that I had Lyme’s Disease because I could feel it burrowing into my bones and destroying my nervous system soon to be followed by stroke and or renal failure. I spoke to my doctor and he laughed at me. Bitch.

It’s not that I’m a hypochondriac, but unlike some people I know that I’m going to do die. I've never heard of anyone living forever and I would like my death to be just a little later rather sooner and by something much more ordinary and less exotic than the disease of the month.

What I do have, or suffer from is Alexithymia, but that’s more of a psychological thing though that's not even recognized by some and it affects me physically. One day I may go into it but not today. Oh and the headaches, well I started getting those when Natasha Richardson died from her skiing accident. Although since I don’t remember skiing since I was eleven and I don’t recall hitting my head more than usual on something, so I don't think it's a build up of blood from a leaky brain. I’ll just put it down to allergies, they seem to get worse and worse as I get older. Who was it that said “old age ain’t for sissies?” They certainly knew what they were talking about.