Oink

For Heaven’s Sake.......if The Recession is not enough to worry about, now it’s Swine Flu! Which is really kinda creepy. I never used to worry about illnesses and Pandemics and pig diseases. Honestly, on the short list of things I worried about, Swine Flu didin’t make the cut. I’m an RN and usually don’t sweat the viral stuff.

I went to the drug store this morning, because I needed to buy some protein bars. (The Teens never have time for breakfast on school mornings, and I refuse to feel guilty for not waking up at dawn daily and feeding them homemade Denver omlettes while they are putting products in their hair. Call me a Negligent Mother. Instead, my kids grab 10grams of protein delivered in a little chocolate bar on their way out to the car. It works for all of us.)

In addition to picking up the bars, I decided to purchase more hand sanitizer in the little containers. I thought The Teens can carry them to school and use them before lunch. It’ll make me feel slightly less anxious if they do that during this Pig Plague. But the drug store was completely out of hand sanitizer! The cashier told me that people have been buying it all week by the cases to use at their work places and so forth. Oi!! (Or “Oink” somehow seems more appropros.)

Candidly, I think the media is prepetuating this hysteria, as they usually do. From what I’ve read, this flu is not worse than the standard flu. It just seems to be spreading more rapidly, and there is currently not an immunization for it. We are just to take the usual kind of Winter Illness Precautions. But people panic. I remember folks buying flashlights by the handful and moving to wilderness log cabins in the months before Y2K. And I recall the sale of Self Contained Breathing Apparatus’ post 9-11. I thought that was all so silly.

But still, this is unsettling. I don’t remember navigating through a Pig Pandemic before. Hopefully this’ll all blow over in a few weeks, and then we’ll be on to the next Gloom-And-Doom State of Affairs forecasted by the Debbie Downers.

......Somehow the thought of living in a log cabin in the wilderness doesn’t sound quite so crazy in my middling age......