How do you guys feel about swine flu?Well, it's a retarded question, 'cos any pandemic diseases are terrible things. I actually just wanna talk about it in a more personal level.
In news gathering class, we learn that proximity is as an important factor in news writing as prominence, or even timeliness. Although, yes, there is a term, 'news is new', and no such thing like 'it's only newsworthy when it's close to you', but that it true. Of course we are proned to be more affected when something occurs nearby, rather than if it happens in Timbuktu, or somewhere far away.
Well, anyway, I'm kinda rambling here. The relation between these all with my first question about swine flu is that, yes, WHO has upped the pandemic alert to 6, and hundreds of people have died because of it, and not one day passes by without a mention of swine flu in the news. Of course this is an enough reason for everybody to freak out and feel scared.
But, I haven't been really thinking about it, or allowing myself to be worried. It's like those things when you're almost certain it won't ever happen to you, because, well, just because. I'm relatively a boring person, and nothing ever really happens to me. I have never witnessed anything particularly exciting, like one time in Oklahoma, two of my classmates ran back to class, all sweaty and breathless, and they were like, "Oh my god, we just saw a chase between a police car and some bad guy and there were guns!" See, I have never been in that situation, even a minor one. My sister was once in the taxi and it hit another car, so there was this major fight drama, involving both drivers yelling and cursing at each other. Nothing ever happened to me, that the thought of swine flu doesn't even affect me anymore.
The possibility of me actually catching swine flu is even more unlikely than having pigs shooting out of my arse.
So this morning I was browsing news in the internet and read that there were another 16 new cases of swine flu in the island. Normally, I would have known that the victims must have been like, foreign students who just came back from US, and their friends, or their relatives. But these last few days, the pattern has been slightly inconsistent, because cases were found locally. It's like, having set up a parameter to protect a country from the outside, and suddenly finding out that there's a mole inside, and that sort of just changes everything. (Have I been seeing too much '24'?)
Anyway, this is what I came across:
A third cluster of locally—infected cases has also been identified at popular nightclub Butter Factory at One Fullerton.At first I thought it was funny, 'cos hey, I went to Butter Factory just last week. And then I checked the date, and oh shit! It was Wednesday, the same night I was in the club.
The new case is a 19—year—old Singaporean female student. She visited the
club on June 17 when three previously reported cases were also there.
The Health Ministry has advised all those who had visited Butter Factory on
June 17 to monitor their health and seek medical attention if they feel
unwell.
Actually, we were planning to check out the new branch of the club in Fullerton, and we were already there, trying to get in. But the queue was ridiculously long, which we didn't expect at all. We sort of hung around and said hi to a couple of friends we accidentally met there, but later decided to just leave to another place.
Was the poor swine-flu victim there among the crowd when we were there? Or has she perhaps, gone inside? Only then did it hit me, how close we were, are, to everything. And I don't know, maybe it's not such a crazy idea to think that it could happen to me, to all of us.
I'm not gonna start freaking out or anything, but just a kind reminder to everyone, I think it won't hurt to pay more attention to our health, to take care of ourselves a little better. We will be fine as long as our immune system is good, and that means, don't let yourself get too tired, never miss a meal, drink a lot of water, and rest enough.
And, good luck to us.