Hey I’ve just gone viral. In the old sense of the word, that
is, with a bad case of what I have dubbed the Florida crud. It started like a
nightmare, my throat dipped in kerosene and set afire, my ears serving as blistering
passageways where the flames escaped. My bones ached like they’d been stomped a
thousand times during the running of the bulls in Pamplona—or at least through
downtown Tampa. I coughed and hacked until my insides turned out and I did the
unmentionable over the toilet. The only missing element was, no gastric
involvement, and so I survived the past several days on bouts of bed rest and ate
cough drops as if they were popcorn.
I haunted the aisles
of the drugstore, reading the labels on the nostrums as if they were blurbs
from hot novels designed to deliver prurient thrills. I finally settled on Advil,
and took enough pills that I could, after several days of negative gravity, muster
the energy to dial my friend Vi to apologize for not calling her to let he know
that I had indeed arrived in beautiful Southwest Florida for the winter only to
be felled by some local bug lurking on the underside of the pristine weather.
Guess what? Vi sounded worse than I did. Vi, being Vi, a
woman careful to look after her health, had already been to the doctor, who
told her there was nothing she could do, would not prescribe an antibiotic.
This was a case of the old fashioned viral nasty. The best the doc could offer
was to suggest that Vi stock up on some high test cough syrup and tough it out.
Vi could return for medical intervention if her cough hung on for more than six
weeks. Six weeks?
Vi confessed that she is hiding out from the Centers for
Disease Control and I am loath to rat out my friend, so I am not using her real
name. Vi is terrified that she’s the CDC hit list, since she was silly enough
to attend a seminar, from which she had to excuse herself several times to go
out and hack her head off in the hall.
Not the way to go viral these days. This was no hit on the
best seller list, where we had had hit the jackpot with a bestseller on Amazon.
This was just a wake-up call from the real world where going viral is not at
all glamorous, and the old meaning, viral, rears its ugly head and asserts its
original meaning with a deadly sting.
