Quarantine

You've heard how students in nursing school will become slightly hypochondriacal*, diagnosing themselves with this and that illness as they learn symptoms of various diseases. They read about renal failure and suddenly one side of the lower back is sore. It's silly. Until it happens to you. Or something like it.

When you work in Human Resources you hear a lot about "Wellness." How can we keep the workforce from making each other sick?

Good God forbid a pandemic flu!

If you're sick, stay home. We must combat presenteeism.

It's having a nurse effect on me. I had a flu shot, I take multi-vitamins, I exercise, I eat salad for lunch almost every day, but I take inventory of my daily life and instead of seeing the forces in it that are good I see all of the threats of illness lurking like shadows.

In the office there is a quiet soundtrack of sneezes and coughs that rattle like distant gunfire on a battlefield. On the bus- Oh! The bus. Wet, steamy, sickly bodies cramp like fetid sardines into a tin can that crawls the streets like a streetcar named MRSA infection. Today a man with a craggy face, shabby clothes, and a gargly cough sat two feet from me. So violent were his coughs that at one point he opened up his backpack to heave his mucosal spasms into it. Nice. All I could think about was that WASPy-looking guy who knowingly boarded a commercial plane with Tuberculosis months ago.

Yesterday at the gym I was cruising along, minding my own business and trying not to look at the clock when a 40-something guy with a Randy Johnson haircut took the treadmill next to mine. Within minutes he was sweating and his B.O. was the worst I have ever smelled. I tried breathing in the opposite direction, but the stench permeated all of the air available to my suffering lungs. Relax, I told myself, You reek, too. But this was of no comfort because my mind was spinning. Surely this man's acutely offensive B.O., pheromone-free, is his body's way of telling him that he is ill and should not be exercising. He is so ill that his pores are manufacturing a skunk-like scent as a warning to passers-by that says: This man is an epidemic waiting to happen and if you have any salt you should throw it on him to see if he melts... or something. I didn't have any salt so I switched machines to get away from Bubonic Bob.

I've got a small sniffle and my allergies are acting up, but so far I've been able to chalk my seemingly disease-dome-like existence up to neurosis. If I should disappear for too long, though, call my mom, because it means I'm laid up somewhere, a consumptive wretch with dysentery to boot, and there's a pretty penny in life insurance coming her way.

Curses ye infectious mobs.


*I looked it up 'cause I thought it would be hypochondriatic but it's not so shut it.