China Germ Warfare

I spent my childhood in the dirt. If a way existed to scrape, bump, bruise, cut, puncture, scar, strain or dislocate myself, I was fully aware of it by age seven. I might be the only person who ever dislocated a middle finger by pulling up sweatpants (at the well-worn age of eleven).

I wasn’t the most graceful growing up either. Every face-plant I took in the gravel parking lot of high school as I tried to figure out those most torturous of beauty accessories, high heels, was my vaccination against the ground germs that survive in scrapped knees and blisters.

Arrogantly, I thought myself fairly acclimated to a wide slice of those minor bugs and viruses out there. After all, I have traveled in six continents now, and except for a rather unfortunate night spent in an outhouse in Kenya’s Tsavo desert, I have survived microscopic assaults fairly unscathed.

…but China, with its 1.3 billion people and highly congested cities, is a utopian playground for the type of germs that would eat those American wussy viruses for lunch. This week a large proportion of the first year foreign teachers have fallen captive to one of these Asian super bugs. I am definitely one of them.

In late autumn when I just had the ‘sniffles’, the enthusiastically helpful Chinese teachers insisted the best remedy for me was fresh air. While snow flurries drifted on jet stream-worthy breezes, ALL the windows in the middle school were thrown wide open. I would sit at my desk in enough layers that even Randy from A Christmas Story would mock me as I mumbled about how Shanghai doesn’t have any fresh air to let into the building.

This current impairment is too tough for mere “Shanghai Fresh Air” to cure. To find relief I must enter the realm of Chinese Traditional Medicine (CTM…you know it’s important if it has its own acronym). One of my officemates handed me a huge glass bottle covered with Chinese characters that I cannot read but I assume list all the cautions involved with taking the medicine. The warning probably was along the line of “Do not take this medicine if you still have moments of chopstick inaptness or cannot tell the taxi driver that you want to go to Wulumuqi Lu without giggling slightly”.

Taking the risk, I poured myself a spoonful of what had the density and coloring of car grease. Surprisingly, the medicine must be the inspiration behind Mary Poppin’s cure-all because it tasted like pure sugar, and it worked. (Eli Lilly take heed.) I have never felt so instantaneously better. Within 48-hours my cough lost that certain rumbling that sounded like I was in imminent danger of losing a lung.

Unfortunately, the germ, sensing its defenses crumbling in the lung, has fortified itself and is currently in siege-mode within my nasal cavity.

My students have, of course, been showering me with concern and support. Their get-well wishes include:
“Wait, say that word again, it sounded funny.”
“Teacher, do you have a disease that turns your nose red?”
“Try saying this tongue twister!”

I guess I should have been prepared for micro bacteria warfare since I work in the largest Petri Dish imaginable: Middle School.