Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: sick
  • Music: Deirdre Flint, 'Cheerleader.'

Epidemiology is fun for everybody!

Starting yesterday morning, I began to present the exact same symptoms that I was presenting this time last week. That's right: reinfection has been achieved. Yippee! Only wait...no. Not yippee. Anti-yippee. This is the dark reflection of yippee, lurking in the tenebrous corners of the universe, waiting to destroy my enjoyment of everything.

I literally sat down with a pen and paper, made a list of everything I encountered during my probable infection period (assuming a two- to three-day incubation, which is roughly average for this sort of virus), and proceeded to check off the things that I encountered during the period where I didn't get sick. Like John Snow on his quest for the Broad Street pump, I was on a quest for a viral reservoir! Only he wasn't, y'know, dying of cholera while he was looking for the thing that caused all that cholera. I am not entirely happy with my needing to catch the virus to know I needed to find it.

The probable culprit? The toothbrush I keep in Kate and GP's bathroom for my Thursday night sleepovers. Kate has thrown it away, and we'll be testing the theory when I go to house-sit for them (starting tomorrow night). So I feel very much like a kick-ass epidemiologist, wiping out threats everywhere that she goes. Except for the part where, oh, yeah, I'm still sick. I had to go to work today, since it's already a short week, and literally nearly passed out at my desk several times. I feel like death warmed over. I look like death warmed over. The Four Horsemen all want my number. Pestilence called me 'a real hottie.'

If this is my last entry, blame the microbes.
Tags: medical fu, pandemic time
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  • 31 comments

lovefromgirl

November 25 2008, 03:19:56 UTC 8 years ago

Reminds me of the time the otherkin community tried to track the constant noro-something that broke out at its gathers. One site was looking pretty badly contaminated, and everyone was tossing out ideas ("Couldn't have been the water; I drank it and swam in it!" Well, there's your problem...)

If Don Francis had caught smallpox while eradicating it, he might've been nearly as badass as you are right now. Hang in there.

seanan_mcguire

November 25 2008, 03:45:21 UTC 8 years ago

Ah, smallpox. Best horrible spotty plague ever conceived. Someday, it will return, because nothing is ever really extinct, and then? Then, we're all gonna die.

kyra_neko_rei

November 25 2008, 04:45:39 UTC 8 years ago

Primus, I hope not. That would be embarrassing. I'd much rather my race be wiped out by something interesting and slightly unexpected like velociraptors or zombies or the planet rising up to kick our ungrateful asses with coordinated volcanic eruptions. Maybe an asteroid, or maybe broccoli will all of a sudden prove to have been slowly poisoning our genomes since the first parent said "eat your vegetables."

Or, better yet, the ages-old war between two subgroups of giant, transforming alien robots, thus providing dying humanity with the hope that our arts and culture will live on in someone's databanks and five hundred thousand years after the last human has died in a brilliant blast of laser fire, somebody will succeed in RickRolling the Supreme Commander of the bad guys, and there will be much rejoicing.

(Because no apocalypse-related comment from me is complete without a mention of Decepticons.)

seanan_mcguire

November 25 2008, 18:45:51 UTC 8 years ago

It would definitely be an embarrassing final pandemic. Also a sociologically fascinating one here in the United States -- how does an image- and youth-obsessed culture cope when the pandemic kills most of the young (those under the age of pre-existing vaccination) and disfigures the survivors?

Fascinating stuff. And hooray for giant robots!

lovefromgirl

November 25 2008, 05:11:21 UTC 8 years ago

Y'know, you're not exactly dissuading me from following Sky and Sunshine to super-tightly-controlled Grand Cayman in twenty years when they retire. :-) I loves me some historical plagues, but not to the extent of wanting to relive them.

The one place I consistently could not infect in that pandemic game was, after all, an island...

kyra_neko_rei

November 25 2008, 05:16:55 UTC 8 years ago

Madagascar kicked your ass too?

*sympathizes*

*doubletakes upon realizing precisely WHAT she's sympathizing over*

*shrugs it off and continues to sympathize*

lovefromgirl

November 25 2008, 05:19:03 UTC 8 years ago

YES.

Yes, I failed to kill the world by one island nation.

*high-fives you*

kyra_neko_rei

November 25 2008, 05:49:34 UTC 8 years ago

Well, if every other nation is destroyed by disease, then there should be a few nuclear weapons lying around . . .

seanan_mcguire

November 25 2008, 18:59:39 UTC 8 years ago

Dude, that is TOTALLY worth sympathizing over. Damn Madagascar.

kyra_neko_rei

November 26 2008, 05:28:16 UTC 8 years ago

*shrug* Rest of the world killed = lots of unguarded nukes. Boom. Problem solved.

seanan_mcguire

November 25 2008, 18:59:13 UTC 8 years ago

Ah, Madagascar. Sweet, horrible, wickedly randomized Madagascar.

I would've totally loaded catapults with plague blankets and flung 'em if that were an option.

hms42

November 25 2008, 06:38:36 UTC 8 years ago

Were you in the dead dog @ OVFF when Bill Roper did this song?

http://www.filker.com/songs/Snowflakes.html

(A recording (not great quality) does exist.)

seanan_mcguire

November 25 2008, 18:59:54 UTC 8 years ago

I was! I clapped my hands and squealed a great deal.