The Blogger's Physical Condition

I read an article in the Sunday Times about a woman who blogged a detailed chronicle of her flu, which had been passed on from her child, who picked it up at preschool. She traced the flu's origins back to the Chinese bird that first had it, mused on the state of her existence, and described the symptoms in excruciating detail. Why the hell? That sounds like someone with too much time on their hands!

See, this is why I'm not a REAL blogger. When I got my double ear infection this week (one infection per ear) I didn't blog at all. I didn't work on any cartoons. I COULDN'T HEAR the innaugural address. I just lay around in a pharmaceutical haze. But, just so you know, this is what it is like: My hearing is down to about 50% so I feel trapped inside a bubble--which reminds me of visiting Europe--only a vague sense of what people around me are talking about. I can hear my pulse clearly, however, like a pile driver pounding inside my skull. Chewing a piece of toast is like series of roadside bombs. The pain, I'm sure, is equivalent to what the prisoners at Guantanamo endure having ball points jammed into their ears. And then there are the auditory hallucinations -- strange far-off snake-charmer music, people walking through the house, snails chewing leaves in the garden...Chilling.

I generally avoid taking antibiotics. People in my family swallow them like candy at the first sign of a scratchy throat, but my approach has always been, like Bush foreign policy, "Bring It On!" Whatever bug doesn't kill me will make my immune system stronger. I don't take flu shots or novacaine either. When I see a tsunami coming I grab a boogie board.

Antibiotics fail now more than they used to. At least I can say anecdotally this is true, and I know from reading that the bacterium of the world have grown stronger, scarier, and more resistant. Hae got a flu-like illness in the fall that wouldn't go away and a throat culture determined it was not viral, so it was, bring on the Oxomoxodoxocillin! Dr. Ross said, "When you pee you'll be killing fish in the bay." So she did. The fish died, but the antibiotic failed! Now I'm swallowing big horse pills, wiping out schools of dolphins, and they seem to have no effect. That's it. We've engineered our own demise. Antibiotics will cause the fall of the American Empire, like lead pipe did for the Romans! Gee, there's probably even a way to interpret antibiotics into the Book of Revelations.