Flu diary: Great Pandemic 2009, part 6
Colorado Springs — Sabbath, November 21, 2009: Wolfy's sixth birthday, I wake and feel good, and it is an amazing sensation, as if it is something I never have experienced before, I actually feel life thrumming through me, welling up inside like a clean spring, and this is so different than the last five days. But the thing of it is, it does not feel as if it has been five days, but more like five weeks of not feeling quite alive.
I am capable of writing Part 4 in the Flu Diary and the screen is not so blurry. Amazingly, not as many typographical errors are eager to leap away from my fingers like playful puppies gamboling across my keyboard. I find myself laughing, for seemingly no reason. I mean I feel alive. It feels good.
When you are healthy and going about your daily business you hardly notice such things as health, and strength, and just feeling good. Living life is a wonderful thing, but we rarely notice such an everyday normality.
The hot shower is like baptism in melting butter. I try to keep my singing soft enough that none of my beloved sleepers is catapulted out of bed. I feel like Scrooge when he wakes on Christmas morning and realizes he has a chance to feel good, be good, do good, and scream and laugh and dance. I do my best to keep my screaming and laughing and dancing to a bare minimum (and I vow not to make any puns on the word bare).
I'm alive and healthy and have beaten the flu. It is gone, I have trounced it. I dress in real people clothes — the kind of clothes you wear when you are alive — jeans, I love jeans, and boots. No more sicky clothes.
For good measure I do a nose flush. Shockingly, some of the same nightmarish stuff emerges from my nostrils, the same things that came out of Wolfy yesterday. Was that really only yesterday, Friday morning?
Some snaky little red things swim out and slither down the drain. Tiny red veins, perhaps a little thicker than hairs, only half an inch long. And I spit some blood out of my mouth. I will not describe some of the things I hacked up, coughing up out of my throat, but if imagining clotted turtles — malformed and stillborn — if that image helps you in any way to picture it, I will leave it there. But truly nasty business.
And that stuff was inside me. The flu is a slob, a messy, bizarre house guest, an abusive bully who barges in uninvited and rearranges everything in your house, coating everything with a disgusting gelatin.
After checking on everyone and refilling all the vaporizers, I got out and pick up bagels at Einsteins. The day seems alive with light, the sky is emanating blue, and I wonder if I have somehow awakened in Hawaii, because this is paradise, the air tastes good. I have been lying down for a week and now I am walking.
I notice that I walk like an old man when I am out in the world. Slowly, choosing my steps carefully. If I step too hard, I feel it in my teeth, and throughout my head. Okay, I decide, I am not perfect. I cannot leap up in the air and do a whole bunch of Matrix flips and wired kicks (although I had been considering trying it).
When I arrive back at home, emerging into the kitchen, I find that all of my energy is gone. I am out of breath, a little bit wheezy, and light-headed. I received an allotment or shining pure energy, and I squandered it on fetching bagels.
The family is up, and everyone seems fine today. All the kids are obviously sick today, even resolute Dirklan is slower than usual. Bronté, the most recently fallen ill, is not too bad off today, and Wolfy is all smiles. They are excited about Wolfy's birthday party, and the arrival of Grandma Chapman tonight (she assures her daughter Carolena that she is in no way afraid of the flu, Swine or otherwise), who will bring balloons as well as Wolfy's cake.
The kids jabber through their nose flushes and all of them are delighted with the amounts of mucus they bring up. They bring up their own malformed turtles. They beg for Elderberry-Zinc lozenges as if they are requesting candy.
I, on the other hand, am ready to return to bed. I fall into a dead sleep and do not wake until well after noon. Carolena brings me my cranberry bagel smeared with Tofutti cream cheese, stacked with lettuce and spinach, with far too many onions packed between the bread for any kind of comfortable eating.
This is possibly the best sandwich I've masticated, in my entire life.
So I have decided that I attempted to do too much. I never should have gone out. Just a short trip exhausted me. And I might be figuring this all wrong, but it seems most likely to me that the virus in our house changed to access Bronté, and it jumped from her to poor Wolfy who was just seeming better from his initial illness, and now it has jumped to me. So far, it does not seem as bad as the original one that took me down, and except for the bleeding from the nose this morning, I am not as worried about this incarnation of the flu as much as I was about the initial invasion.
The kids are happy and full of energy. They decorate the dining room with balloons. They create mysterious hieroglyphics which they tape about the room. Seven-year-old Dirklan has actually taken the initiative to wrap all of Wolfy's presents, and he has done a better job than I could do. Today, the kids rank in age 6, 7 and 8, and for a month they will be in a line like that until Bronté turns nine years of age on Christmas Eve.
Grandma and Uncle Michael show up and Mama serves Wolfy's choice for dinner, her incredible homemade pizza (inundated with rice cheese). Then there are a slew of presents to open and a birthday cake from Whole Foods Market, a far too-rich cake called Chocolate Eruption.
By the time it is all over, I am so completely blasted I cannot believe everyone else is giggling and playing Wolfy's new Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots set (I had the same toy at about his age). It is amazing that in the time of flu, even while infected with a nasty virus, life goes on. Kids look forward to opening their presents and eating their cake. And Papas have to stumble around with cameras taking pictures.
I think I am more worn out from the socializing than I am from the virus. But before I conk out completely, I fill all the vaporizers and aid in most of the nose flushes. And I finally crash, very tired, very worn down.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
I wake to a bad headache. I take three aspirin. I hang out in bed for a while, just lying prone, thinking.
Thinking influenza thoughts.
The facts are, the flu is still a mystery, almost 100 years after the 1918-1919 Pandemic, science has not made much progress in understanding how it works, how it moves, how it mutates. In 1918-1919 often the voracious version of the virus vetted itself in far-flung places, without any known physical tie, it vehemently made itself known. As if it could teleport.
As if the same mutation took place, at the same time, as if in agreement. Entanglement?
Think about a squadron of geese flying in perfect formation. They change course. All the individual geese react as if simultaneously receiving the same signal.
Think about a school of fish, even a very large school of fish, all moving perfectly together in equidistant perfection, and suddenly a threat is perceived and as one the entire school of fish performs a spectacular about-face maneuver, more sharply and precisely than the finest trained military unit could ever hope to achieve.
Is it an "overmind?" A mind that is formed out of the collective? Like nanobots combining to make a singular machine, does nature patch together its own form of programming? A genius mind much greater together than in its miniscule parts?
The idea in Quantum Mechanics that entanglement exists, that it is real, that two particles can become one unit — the way a man and a woman become "one flesh" —a solitary unit, and no matter how far apart they are, a change to one effects a change to the other. Like Alexandre Dumas' Corsican Brothers, you stab one twin, the other feels it.
Perhaps the influenza virus works in a similar fashion. Maybe it is always linked. Not that it is always communicating, but that like a rain forest, it is one vast creature. Like an aspen forest, the vast network of entangled roots is actually one solitary aspen entity.
Perhaps the influenza is an overmind, or is entangled. Especially a "novel" influenza such as the Swine Flu, maybe it is not two individual Corsican brothers, but trillions upon trillions of Corsican brothers. You stab one flu virus, and they all grasp at their breast.
In Florida you treat influenza with Tamiflu and simultaneously the virus evolves in Hungary, Japan, and Norway.
Shooting up millions of people with a flu vaccine almost forces the virus to take extreme measures. Perhaps it feels threatened. Or more accurately, it feels attacked.
If the flu could be questioned, and if it deigned to answer, it would probably say it wants nothing more than to expand and develop. It wants freedom. Much like us, it just wants to achieve its dream. It wants to travel to far place, interesting place, and meet lots of friendly people.
Viewed from space, looking down on the world, you see flashes of blue, bright and vivid along the coast of California, but look, over here in China the same flashes of blue, and far up in Siberia, feint twinkles of the same blue. It is the influenza overmind, trying something new, like a safecracker attempting to figure out my eight-year-old daughter.
And in Hawaii flashes of green. Looking closely, you see the same hue of green in India, as well as in Spain. And suddenly, as you watch, the green lights around the world and the blue lights around the world, begin to flash in syncopated intervals, almost as if they are sending back and forth signals of light.
Then all at once the lights merge and become a vivid turquoise. The overmind has accepted a variation.
Scientists all over the world begin calling each other. They are noticing something strange.
We think that influenza spreads so quickly because of modern travel. But perhaps, even as early as 1918 and long before, influenza did not have to spread cough to face to cough to face. Perhaps influenza was already there, spread out around the globe, flashing colors. Making decisions.
Glowing global.
These are just a few influenza thoughts early on a Sunday morning.
