Germs

Last week, one of my nightmares pulled its way into reality.

No, nobody broke into my house.

Nobody was kidnapped.

I'm not being stalked (that I know of...)

Instead, my serene bubble of sterility and wellness has been popped and my family has succumbed to... the stomach flu.

Dun dun DUNNNNN

Some of you might understand the chaos of my dilemma, and some of you might be sitting at your computers, wincing and saying "is that it?"

It's because there are two different kinds of people.

There are the people who aren't bothered by germs at all. They breathe in other people's germs like it's as fresh as a spring afternoon. It just doesn't bother them. It's because it doesn't bother them that they sometimes don't realize that if they do get sick, they don't let that stop them from running around and infecting everyone else.

Then there are the people who see germs like the microscopic, heinous little demons they are, and try to avoid them at all costs. :P

I might be what you'd classify as a germaphobe. But... I *have* gotten better over the years. I went from freaking out over pretty much any kind of sickness, to just the kind that will have you lying around in pain and agony for 12 hours. That, unfortunately, is what's circulating through our house right now.

So far I've managed to avade it. For the first week, I was a germ warrior. I washed my hands after touching practically everything: countertops, doorknobs, refrigerator and cupboard handles... and suffice to say, the current dryness of my hands make alligators' skin look like this:

I was all over not catching this thing. I was pretty sure that if I washed my hands enough and stayed away from the invalids, then maybe I could make it to the other side completely untouched by the stomach flu's sinister claws. That was at the beginning of last week.

See, one of the reasons why I'm such a germaphobe is HOW LONG it takes my family to recover. We have 9 people in my family. It's been hitting one or two people every two or three days. It takes a painfully long time for it to hit everyone. Every day has dragged by like its own week. I've hardly left the house since my mom caught it at the beginning of last week.

Although so far my physical health has been left untouched, my mental health has been slowly slipping through the cracks. Since the Monday before last, I've been nervously waiting for someone else to fall victim. It's taken a toll on my sanity. Aside from the cabin fever that everyone is suffering with, Every two or three days my paranoia would jab me and whisper menacingly into my ear, "You're next, Kaylee..."

And on Monday, the unthinkable happened: My dad came home from work sick. AGAIN. And last night my mom ALSO caught it again. O_O Whether it's the same flu, or if we caught yet ANOTHER illness, I'm still unaware. All I know is that I can say that in the transpiring events, my anxiety scale has decreased dramatically. It was this week that I begun to go from this:

To this:

It's not that I want to catch it now... but I think it's almost become more like a word that you say over and over and over again: If it held some sort of meaning before, it's been lost in the repetition.

Photo cred:

Tiny ugly germs

Perfect skin lady