GERMS-DUN DUN DUN-

You know what I love?  Germs.  Haha, wait oh no, that’s close to the top of my list of things I despise and want to throw into a ditch and burn.  -.-

Oh boy, what a fun story I have to tell all of ya’ll.  You know that cringe-y feeling you get when you hear someone cough even relatively close to you in a store/any place in public?  I get that too, so much that when I see a sale on Bath and Body Works’ scented hand sanitizers I like to buy at least enough to last a whole year….or two. 

Now, I don’t get sick very often, maybe a couple colds from the whole weather change and all that fun stuff in the past, when I was younger, and some strange thing from a germy cousin whose can of soda I drank out of.  That was an interesting thing that happened.  See, I was spending the day after Thanksgiving at a cousin’s house to play Sims 2 and other random stuff we wanted to do.  I had gotten a plastic cup and filled it with some delicious knock-off soda called Dr. B, while my cousin just had a can.  We were getting into the game, switching back and forth with who was going to have torturous control of these pixelated lives, and after a while, something so funny happened that we were both nearly on the floor laughing.  In that moment I was like ‘Woo, I’m thirsty’, and happened to grab the can.  Of course, right after, I was saying to her ‘Hey, did you have the can….’  She didn’t know she was sick with a tough little cold, or thought she was already over it.  Either way, I spent the next week with coughing and sneezing, going ‘Whyyyy’.  Although not the worst (no running down the hall to the toilet with my hand over my mouth) that had happened, it made me really cautious of germs everywhere.

 

It has been three weeks since my most recent incident, which just happened at the most wonderful time.  It was after working, I went into an H-E-B to go ahead and get a few goodies for baking desserts for Christmas, as it was December 19th, and the next week we would be making stuff.  I went inside, and in Austin we have this FREAKING awesome thing where you HAVE to have a reusable bag or pay for plastic/paper bags(like 20 cents each-.-), so as I got to the produce area, I noticed that I forgot the bags.  Crap! I abandoned my cart and ran all the way back out to the parking lot to get the bags from my Dad.  When I got back inside, everything was all good, my cart was where I left it and I just needed to call my Mom at home to see if there was anything else we needed.  As I was speaking with my Mom, someone had parked their cart-car-for-kids-thing about 3-4 feet away from me with a 7 year old girl in it.  Just a handful of words into talking with my Mom, this kid open mouth coughed.  And when I say open mouth, I mean like you’re ready to suck in air to blow out candles open mouthed.  I looked around for the owner of the obviously disease ridden thing that had coughed loudly and openly until I DEATH GLARED at her, to no avail.  That’s right, a (as I would later find out) sick kid, was just dumped off near the fruit by some imbecile, and I couldn’t find them anywhere in the vicinity.  Not much more than 30 minutes later, at the end and after my shopping experience, I started to feel this tiny little tickle at the back of my throat.  I had that little voice in the back of my head, nudging me, telling me this was going to be bad, sooooo bad.  That voice talked me into taking 2k milligrams of  Vitamin C when we got home, before dinner.  Of course, the next morning at work I found out that it wouldn’t help me much. 

 

By the next morning, I felt like utter and complete CRAP.  I felt lousy, weak, and tired.  I tried to help as best I could, since we were finishing shingling a repair for a customer, but I found that lifting a 5 pound can of roofing nails felt like I was trying to bench 300 lbs.  My Dad eventually finished up, and we went home.  From that point, it just went downhill.  I took a shower, trying to get up the phlegm I had trapped in my lungs, and trying to keep myself from feeling cold.  Saturday and Sunday went by in a blur with me reaching a fever of 102 F and fluctuating between that and 99F.  Some point on Sunday morning/night I had accidentally coughed on my Mom, so she had some of it, but not as bad as myself with the 2-day fever and coldness bit.  We figured we weren’t going to do anything but sit in sad sickness on Christmas, seeing as we were supposed to make gifts for everyone, and we had all gotten sick by Tuesday the 24th.  Sleep was hard to come by, since every 15 minutes I would take too deep a breath and start into a cough attack.  Relatives brought their gifts and food over, since for the past few days we had eaten just a couple cups of broth, and pretty much anything else prior to the Christmas foods had tasted like eating salt blocks, unless it was potatoes.  Fried, baked or mashed potatoes were the greatest thing after four days of no solid anything, just broth…or Theraflu, yuck.

 

Eventually the fever part went away, dragging Christmas celebrations with it as time just kept on moving like lightning.  For about half of another week, the upper-respiratory phlegm thing was so bad that it hurt for us to take deep breaths.  New Years came flashing by soon enough, and we were still cooped up inside.  We were peering out the windows like Sméagol  every time fireworks went off, and I took to apologizing every five minutes for not remembering those bags when I first ran in the store.  There’s no guaranteeing that I wouldn’t have been coughed on at some other point, like while I was picking my boxes of baking butter, or while perusing the baking aisle for the goodies I needed. 

 

During all of this sickliness, I’ve been imagining all of the ways to torture and wound these imbeciles who bring their sickly children who cough EVERYWHERE into stores.  I’ve considered carrying oranges around to throw at the parents’ heads, or just throwing them all in a pit and filling it with Theraflu.  Maybe take the Sam Puckett route from iCarly and butter sock them in the faces until they swear to NEVER take sick children anywhere ever again.  I’ve also found out how far I can go into Gross-Ville with this sickness, since in the beginning I was so weak and tired all the time that the thought of showering at all, was just…like a horror movie in my mind.  I went for so long, that I think the layer of oils on my hair was like an inch thick, and don’t get me started on underarm hair.  I went for four days.  FOUR DAYS without even just, I don’t know, shaving my underarms.  I was getting reeeeeeeally close to the point of learning to braid it (KIDDING, but not really). 

 

Back onto the point of these horrible parents, why?!  What in the world makes you think taking your sick kid into the store is a good idea?  It’s obvious that they’re sick when they’re coughing that loud with the raspy phlegm sound at the end of the cough.  Do these people realize how irresponsible they are?  How can you not teach your kids about covering their face?  HAVE you HEARD of a babysitter?  I bet you that at LEAST 10 other people, besides myself, got this sickness from just that one cough near the fruits.  To make things worse, I heard several more coughs while I was wandering through the store.  And another thing!  If you’re the manager of a store, would you ask these people, who are letting their children cough EVERYWHERE, to leave the store?  After a conversation with my Mema(grandmother), my father found that the manager of a new small grocery/supermarket near us told a woman with several sick kids to please leave, while my Mema was in the store.  I was amazed.  Why doesn’t anyone else do this?!  Do they, in other stores, realize how much sickness you could prevent?

 

So here I am now, three weeks later, finishing writing this near noon, and I’m actually able to go out in public without fear of being contagious(though phlegm still is being my lung buddy).  Middle of last week, my lungs stopped being pained with deep breaths, and I actually am back to showering like a normal human!  If after reading all this you’re thinking, ‘What is phlegm?’ Click Here, (do it, do it, do it) but you might not want to, phlegm looks gross (do it, do it, do it. Stop it <_<).  I’m actually slowly getting back to working, although this polar vortex had made it really hard to stay warm and well.  But man does time fly when you’re having germs!

 

Thanks so much for reading my rant/story about these buttholes who like to take sick people around with them.  Aaaaaand I’ll see you again before the weekend!  BYE! Smile