| Magnified 500,000 times, this is what the virus I've got looks like under a microscope. |  |
I've read that a virus is not exactly a living thing. But it's not exactly a not-living thing, either. It's somewhere between a living thing and a not-living thing. In other words, a zombie. Which is why, though a virus can kill you, you can't kill it. All you can do is throw vitamin C, Tylenol, cups of hot tea and bowls of chicken soup at it (none of which it supposedly likes) and hope it eventually goes away, which it usually does eventually, though sometimes not before inviting some of its bacterial infection buddies over to party in you, which to try and prevent the virus from doing your doctor may give you antibiotics which of course have no effect on your zombie virus and which, if if you don't finish all your prescription of, may quell your symptoms but will allow the strongest of the bacterial buddies to not only get away alive and scott-free but to go invade someone else, proliferate and spread in a now antibiotic-resistant state all because you, along with millions of other other people who understand how antibiotics work no better than you do, didn't finish your prescription. But that's only if you didn't finish your prescription. Which hopefully you did.
But I digress.
Anyway, the particularly insidious zombie microbe which I refer to as My Cold ("Ouuuu, summer colds are the worst!" sympathetically tsks everyone I meet) and under which my body parts have been attack since the night of Friday, July 31, seems in no particular hurry to be done with me and depart for the nether regions from which it arose. (Which begs the question: where do viruses come from? I mean, besides other people? And while we're on the subject, anybody who's been to the movies in the past 20 years knows that humans turn into zombies from catching a virus, but how did viruses turn into zombies?). The mega-doses of vitamin C that I lob at this invisible zombie invader seem no more effective than bullets bouncing off Godzilla, though my virus does seem to be morphing on a daily basis. One day I'll be coughing up a lung, the next day merely blowing my brains out through my nose. Another day I'll spend plodding along in that tired, achy, indescribably crappyesque state that my mother the nurse used to call general malaise. There've been a couple of days I've felt like the living dead. As I write this I'm nursing my standard night-time headache and sore throat.
If only someone could figure out how to shoot the brains out of a microbe.
But I digress.
Anyway, the particularly insidious zombie microbe which I refer to as My Cold ("Ouuuu, summer colds are the worst!" sympathetically tsks everyone I meet) and under which my body parts have been attack since the night of Friday, July 31, seems in no particular hurry to be done with me and depart for the nether regions from which it arose. (Which begs the question: where do viruses come from? I mean, besides other people? And while we're on the subject, anybody who's been to the movies in the past 20 years knows that humans turn into zombies from catching a virus, but how did viruses turn into zombies?). The mega-doses of vitamin C that I lob at this invisible zombie invader seem no more effective than bullets bouncing off Godzilla, though my virus does seem to be morphing on a daily basis. One day I'll be coughing up a lung, the next day merely blowing my brains out through my nose. Another day I'll spend plodding along in that tired, achy, indescribably crappyesque state that my mother the nurse used to call general malaise. There've been a couple of days I've felt like the living dead. As I write this I'm nursing my standard night-time headache and sore throat.
If only someone could figure out how to shoot the brains out of a microbe.
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