Monsters under my mucus

I'm not sick. I'm not. I mean, yeah, I have some issues I should be dealing with, but who doesn't? At least I'm not sick. In fact, I've been fortunate this cold and flu season. Four days of wishing I was dead (in Las Vegas and Cincinnati, no less) was all I had to endure. It was a bad-ass illness, to be sure. For me, though, it was up and down relatively fast.

Relatively, you say? Well, yeah. Most people I've met have been dealing with it for a long, long time.

Right now, I'm sitting in the dark. I mean dark-dark. No lights, no TV, no radio LED display. If not for the light of this computer screen (and the ever-so bright light of my achey-breaky heart), I couldn't see anything. And maybe it is the dark that has me a little paranoid, but I'm thinking there has been a little something odd about this season's colds and flus.

Now, it's a given...I get around, govn'ah. I meet all kinds of people in all kinds of places. And, yeah, many of those places are not the cleanest of joints. Regardless, I've not known many people who have not suffered some dread disease this year. And most of them have described it as a lingering death march from the local drug store, to bed, to work, back to the drug store, to the doctor, and eventually to a priest for last rites...you know, just in case.

Now, maybe it's just that my fortunate life has led me to be acquainted with people all over America. Maybe I'm just a little more exposed the maladies of the country at large. Maybe it's just that I'm sitting in the dark at 2:30am. But, this year seems a little odd to me. It seems to me that more people are getting sick this year, they are getting sicker, and they are staying sick longer.

I remember one paranoid night in my garage about 12 years ago when I was talking to a med student friend of mine. He laid out the case for how our overuse of antibiotics was eventually going to make us terminally vulnerable to germs and bugs. I'm not saying that's what we're dealing with here, but I've seen more otherwise healthy people bedridden this year than I've ever seen in my life.

I got rather lucky. While my early December bout with the bug made me wish I dead for 48 hours, I recovered rather quickly. Many other folks have not fared as well.

So, I ask you, delicate reader, am I just being paranoid because of insomnia, darkness, evil spirits, and the ghost of Christmas past? Or do you think something is going on here? Because, I'm not one to go looking for monsters under the bed, but if they start knocking in the middle of the night, I'm at least going to take a peak and make sure they aren't sharpening their fangs for me.