GERM-FEST

I love my daughter, but kids really are a big “germ-fest” waiting to happen. All my life kids have been making me ill. Not because I have an aversion to kids, but because every germ they have somehow manages to transfer to me.

When I was single, before I had my own personal germ carrier, I had my nephews. It never failed that every time I came to visit they would be afflicted with some childhood virus. For example, one winter I came out and they had croup. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of meeting croup, it is a loud cough that often resembles the barking of a seal. Most kids (note I said “kids) that come in contact with the viruses that cause croup won’t actually get it. Instead they will have symptoms of a head cold. I, however, am never that fortunate.

I love my nephews and fortunately they reciprocate the feelings. They used to love to cuddle with me, hug me, and even give me kisses (it didn’t help that they were “on the mouth” kissers), and on occasion, cough or sneeze on me. Thus the germ transfer! I knew as soon as I was coughed on, I was going to get croup. Everyone kept telling me that it was only kids who got it, but I knew.

When I returned home my cough had gotten so bad, people at work were throwing cough drops at me over the cubicle dividers. Someone even came over to see if a seal had escaped the zoo and somehow made its way into our office. Tired of being pelted with lemon and honey cough drops, I finally decided I should go visit my doctor, lest I had some highly contagious virus I was unknowingly spreading to my office workers. As I sat in the exam room waiting for my doctor to come in I started coughing so hard I thought I had hacked up a lung. My doctor came in and said, “That’s some cough you have.”

“Really?” I asked somewhat sarcastically.

Then he listened to my chest and as he did he said, “Hmmm. It sounds like you have croup. Have you been around anyone with croup recently?”

I then told him my tragic story of how I stayed with my sister and my croup inflicted nephews who insisted on coughing in my face. He said, “Yep, that’d do it. Although I don’t see many adults with croup, but you definitely have it.”

With that he put his stethoscope in his lab coat, wrote me a prescription for steroids and some cough syrup so I could sleep at night and told me not to cough in anyone’s face. Funny!

To this day I am constantly washing my hands after I have touched anything a kid has touched. I had a co-worker, who also happened to be a good friend, once tell me that I washed my hands too much and that was why I always got sick. He said that when he had kids he was going to let them get dirty and germy so that their immune systems built up nice and strong. Personally I think that if I didn’t wash my hands so much I might be dead from some exotic disease being passed around by kids!