In a civilized society we are taught to be
kind to one another. Most of us live just a few steps from one another in our
busy impersonal cities. We come and go,
many utilizing public transportation. We eat food prepared by companies that
gather it from all over the globe. Most of our children in these times grow up
not even knowing many of the foods we eat come from the ground.
As long as I have lived there has been some
sort of disease to be eradicated, however, not usually where I live. Of late
pandemic diseases have spread to our neighborhoods. Diseases such as AIDS,
Herpes, various drug resistant flues and now even more deadly diseases like
Tuberculosis. Once thought eradicated TB
has now again begun killing people in Africa.
TB is especially deadly because it can be
passed through the air, by simply being breathed upon. This strain is uniquely virulent being of a
certain strain that is what they refer to as MDR.
The Problem is the outdated medicines that
have been traditionally used to treat TB become ineffective and the disease
becomes resistant and mutates. Becoming something,
which cannot be treated, and the prognosis is always death. It is killing whole families slowly in
Swaziland and other places in Africa. Now I know being a middle class person
living in America or Europe, you think, “That’s Africa.” And there was a time where we could send
money and never hear another word about it. However, it is a different world
now. People travel all over the globe in great numbers. It seems to be a part
of being a global society. My mom
remembers when the only time people worked in other countries was if they were
in the military or had joined the Peace Corps. In our times it is routine to
know people who live and work in other countries and maintain their American
citizenship or European birthrights. I
myself know a couple that moved to Brazil. An accountant no less. How many accountants do you know that
consider jobs that are outside the borders of their own country? With the traveling comes the risks of not
only transporting our worldly goods across oceans but also being carriers for
diseases that people die from.
My brother has been pretty
freaked out about the Ebola crisis. He even began to speak of an apocalypse and
we spoke of food and water storage and I told him where the guns were in the
family home.
I imagined how the community would band
together to communally provide for their needs and assured him not to flee his
job or begin to practice irrational thinking just yet. After that conversation I recalled how just a
mere 4 years ago my own son had contracted the H1N1 Virus from the quickly
prepared live virus inoculation. He was
at deaths door because I panicked and joined others offering up our children to
be experimented on. I later saw where
many had brought suits against the Federal Government for wrongful deaths
resulting from that very immunization.
My son lived, but he was very sick. He fell ill
due to the immunization when he snorted a live virus into his body from a vile.
2 Weeks after that, I found him
laying in front of our sliding door with it thrown wide to let in the cold
night air. He was unresponsive and
running a high temperature. Just before
I dialed 911, I was able to rouse him and get him to his doctor who adamantly
denied that it was H1N1. We treated his
symptoms and he lay close to death and then finally just sleeping for 2
weeks! My mother came to nurse him so I
could go back to work. Yet, no one
realized at the time the significance of that event. I hated myself for all this time and have
tried to put it to the back of my memory that occurred. Its like a nightmare, I
feel as if it really did not happen.
Reacting to public hyper vigilant paranoia, I
went out beside my better judgment, and got him that immunization. That still
haunts me. He is a healthy person now
and is living a full life, I believe because he was blessed by God to live and
flourish in spite of his stupid mother.
What I learned? Not to react, not to overreact, not to
automatically trust what is most important to me in the world to the hands of
anyone else. Not to be persuaded by my
emotions.
In trying to keep my precious son from
contracting a fatal disease, I actually allowed other well meaning? Government
agencies and the CDC who was responding to public pressure to develop an inoculation,
quickly, and then to test it on those of us dumb enough to provide the
opportunity. My question now is where
was that control element we trust to be there, the one that says, wait a
minute?
I heard very little about the H1N1 after our
ordeal. We thought surely we would hear something more. Yet, that is how we are in this society, move
forward whether we learned something from our experiences or not, surely there
is someone taking notes?
Or is that someone just me?
End of part I
