New Life

For my new readers, you must know that I am fascinated by everything disaster and disease. When the South Dakota Public Health Bulletin gets delivered to my office, the mailman KNOWS to put it on top of the pile, just so he can hear me squeal with glee. I'm pretty sure he's waiting for me to lose it out of sheer excitement one of these days and make out with him. It could happen. Even today he brought in the mail and said, "Still not here yet..." I may or may not have glared at him in hatred. I'm having anger issues these days.

Well, I haven't gotten said bulletin for a long, long time. So I went on their website and they haven't PUBLISHED ONE SINCE SEPTEMBER! What? Good citizens want to KNOW what to protect themselves from! Forget about swine flu! The clap has been going up quite steadily since last year and syphillis? Is even worse. And that's gross, because it makes your nose fall off. Not to mention other body parts. But - as you long time readers know, my fascination isn't just with sexually transmitted diseases, it's with rabies and other vector borne illnesses. I know. Weird. I am. You don't have to say anything. Sigh. But look what I found this morning! It answered all of my questions about rabies! Remember when I asked if you develop antibodies after you get rabies so you don't get it again? Well frankly? That's just a silly question because if you get rabies and it progresses, you pretty much croak.

Rabies

Doot Dee Doo... Then, because I was so excited about THAT article, I went to the source of all that is good in the world. The mecca of disease. The mothership of illness. The CDC. Sigh. If I could just spend ONE day following someone that works there, I think I'd be in heaven. So I first went to the Hanta Virus page because someone died of that here in South Dakota a couple years ago. Deer mice. Don't inhale their urine. I'm telling you.

Hanta Virus

And then because I've never looked it up on the CDC website before, I found the infection I had when I was in college. m. Abscessus. Sounds gross, doesn't it? It was. I looked like I had leprosy. Can you imagine my legs covered in a myriad of two inch black boils for over a year? It was prettt---ay. (Seriously, that was some funky bacteria. It grew in matching patterns on both legs!) And I wondered why I never dated in college... After being treated by some dumb ass infectious diseases doctor in Des Moines for six months, they finally sent me to the Mayo Clinic where "Ta da!" They figured out what it was in two hours and sent me home with intravenous antibiotics and told me to take them until my liver failed. Which it did. And there you go. Healed. Then I took up drinking. My poor, poor liver.

M. Abscessus

THEN, I looked up The Meningitis, because that's the sickest I've EVER been in my life and after that two week hospital stay and six more months of rehabilitation? I don't EVER want to be sick again. That was when I filled out all the Living Will crap the social worker visits you with because I did NOT want to continue to linger on with something like THAT. It was horrid.

Meningitis

So, I'm thinking tomorrow, I might visit my favorite Mormon websites because they know the most about preparing for disasters. They rock it hard core. And frankly? They give better advice than the Red Cross when it comes to stuff like that.

Oh, and I cooked.