Mucus Troopers Beware

As I write this piece, I am sort of detained in the lobby of a big food company’s building, thanks to the “glory” that is the A(H1N1) scare. For a community and nation and planet paranoid with this mutated kind of flu, I am a threat. A walking, sneezing and coughing threat.

Thus, I have to contend with a hostile lobby and forgo the meeting which I was initially scheduled to attend. I was banished in the lobby because no brilliant drug company has come up with the magical vaccine that would obliterate the A(H1N1) flu, the same way some geniuses erased small pox and polio on the “now” pages of health journals and medical digests.

Humans are neurotic that way. They fear what they can’t control.

I would hate to admit it but for a few days now, I’ve become the mucus trooper I have grown to detest. Mucus trooper. People who, consciously or unconsciously, are carriers of viruses which they can so easily spread. People who get on with their day, sneezing and coughing, as if nothing were wrong with them.

If I had a choice, I would be at home right now, taking drugs that will eventually “heal” me. Never mind the drowsiness they may cause. I would gladly sleep and be up and well in a day or so. If I had a choice.

But my socio-economic status is, in some absurd way, denying me the right to get sick because one, I can’t afford to seek medical treatment—doctors and drugs included; and two, I can’t afford to take another of those unpaid leaves. I do have bills to pay which I could not possibly do if I don’t work.

I wish to clarify that I am not whining. There are people with far worse socio-economic drama than me. I am lucky to have my bit.

So I am a mucus trooper. But I try to rise above my kind. I cover my mouth whenever I sneeze and cough. I sanitize my hands after I blow my nose. I’m being responsible albeit repressing my body’s call for a break. Even if I have been branded as a threat.

I am a mucus trooper and I am aware of it.

I maybe sick yet I know that the people around me don’t have to be.

And that’s all I have to say about that.