How the Hell Did I End Up Being the One Who Feels Bad???

K... so it's my treatment week and I have a day up in the infusion lab but I ain't sad or blue.

Got my netbook with the 9 cell, mifi, twitter peek, and I brought brownies for everybody.

Deal with that. I can make an IV drug treatment fun.

Only I popped the IV out when I moved.

Nurse: You really are a PAIN!
Me: Yeah, I know, but I'm dying and still brought brownies so you're just mean.
Everyone else: Laughter
Nurse leaves in a huff with tears in her eyes.

Now I feel bad. But I also feel stupid for feeling bad. It was a joke.

AND SHE STARTED IT.

*power sulk*

It's NOT Swine Flu

It's NOT the Swine Flu. Relax.

I understand perfectly why people are paranoid about the Swine Flu. H1N1, as we are now instructed to call it, is scary. Believe me, for a person like myself without a working immune system, it's scary as hell. I get it. Honestly.

What has me scratching my head (it's not lice or scabies or anything else like that... just a figure of speech) is the refusal of strangers to take my word for my non-contagious status. I cough. I don't cough constantly, the way a person with something like emphysema might. I cough a lot in the morning, when I am exposed to quick and extreme temperature changes, or sometimes all of a sudden for no reason I can figure. I've even heard doctors call the PF cough a "nervous" cough. Not because it has anything to do with nervousness... it has similar properties. If I'm coughing like mad I'm probably sick.

But I DO get more phantom tickles than the average person, and I DO sometimes cough like crazy just because I am a PF patient. Most of the time it's a quick, crackly, sharp cough.

When it comes, I cover my mouth. I'm not contagious, but I'm polite. So when a stranger gives me a filthy look in response I'm confused. I don't cough ON anyone. I cough into my elbow. If I'm hacking and horking out of control I'm en route to my oxygen and a call to Ahmed.

A while ago, when H1N1 hysteria took root, I started quietly saying "I'm not contagious" to anyone who looked scared or pissed off at my coughs. I thought it might make them feel better.

Um. Nope. What it did was open the door. Silent glares seem to need some kind of enhancement in order to activate the actual conversation mechanism. Once I've opened my mouth the divide is breached and the launch sequence is ON. I've had everything from "how the hell would YOU know?" to "if you're coughing you're contagious." I don't often know how to respond.

If I clarify we need to sit down for a few. Most people have never heard of PF. I DO have a standard rap:

I have a lung condition. It causes my lungs to rattle and I sometimes cough. It isn't contagious.

That should do it. But it never does. I either get questions that are long and complex to answer or the absurd disbelief reaction. As if I have some mission to be contagious with the rare South Bumblebaria Hooping Disease and have made spreading the deadly coughing death as far and wide as possible.

Yes, please come here, person I have never freaking seen before. Allow me to spit on you, hork at you, and do my gleeful victory dance.

So anyway... here's my last attempt. I'M NOT CONTAGIOUS. If I were I would be busy following the New York Yankees in the off-season, hiding near them at cafes so I could lick the rims of their coffee cups.

K? Good? Good.

The Tax Thing

A recent discussion about taxes, and how many middle to upper-middle income folks have paid in rather than receive a refund, led to an expounding among some friends. The notion that the rich are going to bloody-well-pay is such a silly one. Wealthy people have money because they know how to keep it.

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal recently on just this topic. It said:

...the global rich shuffled more money last year than at any period in the history of private banking...

It estimates that they moved $1 trillion from one manager to another. Some moved the money because they were upset over losses and decided they weren’t going to take it anymore.

Recently Ahmed dragged me off to our accountant for the yearly beating. A great deal of the family money has been moved, recently, overseas. It will stay there. Ahmed now works only 2 to 3 days a week in the US. He conducts a funded study in Canada, where he spends one week a month. The study is not a profit venture, so there is no income from it. But there are also absolutely no benefits to the US economy from it, either. And he has moved nearly all his investment activity back to England, where it is managed by his brother.

Consider, as well, the fact that we won't be giving generously within the US any longer because donations are now penalized ridiculously.

Those laboring under the delusion that Obama is helping the poor are fiscally clueless. The wealthy know how to hang on to wealth. Who pays their share when they move it off-shore?

Got a mirror?