Several months ago I had an absolutely horrible visit from of some kind of stomach virus and I have never spent six hours of my life sicker.  It was awful.  I won’t go into detail because you might be eating as you read this.

So this flu season, never mind the Pig Flu that’s scaring everyone, I’ve been especially wary.  Every time I get the urge to rub my eyes I flash back a couple months to when I was collapsed on the floor of my bathroom wondering if I was going to die and I try to remember when I last washed my hands.

Where I work we typically get offered a flu shot every year around this time.  Considering we work on a university campus with students coming here from all over the world it’s a good spiff.  They have signs posted at the doors to the student union eatery telling the kids to stay the hell out if they feel sick.  But this year our flu shot is delayed because the vendor can’t get enough of it.  Swell.

I’ve been washing my hands like crazy, and keeping a hand sanitizer spray with me everywhere and trying to keep my hands from complaining too much by using a moisturizer at night.  Every time I pass by one of the hand sanitizer stations they’ve installed at work I spritz my hands with some of it.  Then I’m reminded of the taunt from the IRA that the British Government had to be lucky every day while they only had to be lucky once.  I don’t mean to trivialize horrible acts of terrorism, but the relentless logic of germ warfare is like that.  The damn germs only have to be lucky once.

It’s going to be a long flu season.