Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Resistance

I can't help feeling incredibly strange about the fact that I'm not sick. I spent a good portion of yesterday thinking back on the new plague and our experiences with it. Just like everyone else, I've been exposed, there really can't be any doubt about that. I spent weeks tending to the people from Louisville that first fell ill with it. I've been around sick people nonstop for a long, long time.

But some of us just aren't catching it. Maybe whatever strain of the zombie plague we have inside us just waiting to take over when we die is too tough for the new kid on the block. That might be it, or I could simply be the next one to wake up barely able to breathe. Who knows?

On a deeper level, this bugs the shit out of me. It's not as though I want to get sick--all of you know how much I hate being helpless and unable to stand and fight when needed--but me being one of the people still hale and hearty touches on a larger trend for me: I've been very lucky.

Not falling victim to the new plague is only the most recent sign. Yeah, I've been injured several times, but that doesn't make me unique among survivors. We live in dangerous times and work often has to be rushed to get done at all. No, I've been super lucky. A combination of that and some foresight let me save some of my family members, though the majority of them died. One of my brothers and my sister lived, and their families. My mom made it through The Fall itself. The majority of people in New Haven lost literally every person they knew.

I don't like it, mostly because I constantly feel as if the other cosmic shoe is going to drop. That some huge tragedy will rain down upon me and make mockery of the good fortune I've had so far. When the universe aims to balance the scales, there's isn't dick you can do to stop it.

Y'know, if you believe in that kind of thing.

I guess I'm just feeling bad for all the folks who're suffering with every breath right now. I see it in my wife, the folks I'm caring for at the house. I saw it in the patients at the clinic. Hell, I know how awful it is, from severe bronchitis three winters in a row, and one bout of pneumonia that would have killed me had I not grudgingly made a trip to the ER. It wears you down, fighting just to make your chest expand, to drink in trickles of the oxygen you always took for granted.

All I have to do is go fight zombies. Compared to what these folks are dealing with, that's a fucking breeze.

Stupid survivor's guilt.

2 comments:

  1. I was wondering how many people who have become debilitated by the new virus, have previously suffered illness (ie colds and flu) since the fall?

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  2. The funny thing is, there doesn't seem to be a correlation between the two. Evans and Phil have tried to find some links to give us some kind of predictive model of how and why this thing works the way it does, but nothing stands out so far. It's maddening.

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