Swine Flu

On the night before I was due to take my very first high school math final, I felt a pain in my face. It was sharp, like someone had stabbed me in the jawbone, and no matter how many painkillers I ingested, it would not go away. It hurt to swallow. It hurt to move my lips. I didn't know what was wrong, and I could barely articulate what it felt like, because the more I flexed my mouth muscles, the worse it became. My situation seemed grave, but like with most pains, I decided to sleep on it and see if it improved in the morning. It didn't.

Never mind that I hardly studied for my test--having to sit through the final with my face throbbing, while at the same time trying to remember geometric formulas, was a chore in and of itself. By the afternoon, it hurt to walk. Every step triggered a precise blast of pain to my face, and it was beginning to seem apparent that I needed to see a doctor. Fast forward a few hours, and I was lying in a hospital bed, an IV needle shoved into an unlucky vein on my left hand and filling it with intense doses of antibiotics. By this point, the right side of my face had swelled to the point of making me look like a blowfish's cousin. It still hurt to swallow, so food was out of the question, but at least I knew my ailment: by some unlucky chance, one of my salivary glands had been infected. The doctors couldn't theorize how it happened--it just did. And there I was, having to deal with it.

I stayed in the hospital for three days.

The point of recounting this story is to show the idiocy of how the American media (and government) is reacting to the recent outbreak of swine flu. But what does a young girl's salivary gland infection have to do with contracting a nasty bout of flu, you might ask. Well let me tell you something: shit happens. I could wake up tomorrow, and my stomach could be in bits, and I could find out I have ovarian cancer, which is essentially what happened to someone very close to me not long ago. Or I could step out onto the street, and a car could come whizzing by, the driver drunk or distracted or just afflicted with a lead foot, and that would be the end of me. I could have an aneurysm, or I could suffer from internal hemmorhaging of the brain after a fall. A million things could happen to me, so what makes swine flu any different? Why doesn't the American media just tell us all to stay indoors and clothe ourselves in bubble wrap? People die of allergic reactions every day, but you don't see the media up in arms about it being allergy season. And people get the flu all the time (I had a horrible strain of it two months ago), but, transversely, that doesn't mean death is imminent. We live in a country where the health care system, albeit expensive, is sufficient. We can vaccinate and pump ourselves full of antibiotics, and if we're lucky to have working immune systems (which most people I know are), then our bodies will fight and recover. It is that simple.

Okay, but what if swine flu spreads, you ask. Okay, I say, then it spreads. The scientific answer to scientific problems is man-made, so what makes anyone think we won't develop something to combat this in record time? At least in the States, we are going to be fine. If I were living in a third world country, I might fear a pandemic. But not here. The cases are so few, and the number of deaths resulting from those cases is even fewer, and since we don't know the details surrounding those deaths, what is the point of causing panic among a nation full of hypochondriacs? The people who have died might have had shitty immune systems. Or they might have had the flu for too long for medication to take sufficient effect. WE DO NOT KNOW. All we can do is be alert, and try to take steps to be as healthy as possible. Washing one's hands is ALWAYS a good idea. Coughing into one's sleeve (and not in the face of others) is ALWAYS a good idea (not to mention polite).

I guess I can laugh about all this when I'm dead, but until then, I will continue to live my life as a fun-seeking young person. Call me naïve, but seriously, swine flu can suck it!

NEVERMORE.