[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Viral Flu

[Bill Totten]

Earth's Oldest Trojan Horse-Invaders

by Elaine Supkis

Culture of Life News (April 26 2009)


Viruses are one of the Elder Earth Life Forms.  They use us as their
Trojan Horses to invade new territory.  I was one of the very earliest
US victims of the infamous Hong Kong flu.  I got it from a Vietnam Vet
who returned from Nam, came home, partied and collapsed. I was with the
Free Clinic on night shift and I gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation
until the oxygen arrived.  Three days later, I was walking down the
street when I felt very peculiar. It was as if I was sinking into the
sidewalk.  But no, I was literally collapsing.

I was not taken to the hospital because the doctors I worked with
decided to treat me at home with them working with Free Clinic staff, in
shifts.  They thought, at first, this was no big deal but were very
concerned that my fever was shooting upwards, rapidly.  I then had
trouble breathing.  Being semi-conscious, I decided to deliberately
cough up the increasing congestion in my lungs so they put a pan next to
my head and I would turn and choke it up, frequently.

The fever kept rising.  I became very delirious.  The staff ran out of
ice so they went on the FM radio to ask for ice and local restaurants
delivered ice.  My fever was now 105 degrees.  I was told, much later,
that they were discussing how the coffee maker was not working.  I
briefly came out of my seeming coma and said, 'Put the coffee on me,
I'll heat it up for you'.

By then, the staff got a report back that the soldier I saved had died.
 They were already using greater and greater care, not to get sick
themselves.  By day three, two of the staff were now sick, too.  But no
one abandoned me and for that, I am eternally grateful.  I would have died.

As it was, they kept me hydrated and finally, I came out briefly to the
surface to tell everyone, at about three am [known as the hour of death,
by the way] to whisper, 'If a bird sings in the window at dawn, I will
live'.  And there was this big bush outside the window.  At dawn, a wren
perched there and began to sing and sing.  I sighed and fell asleep and
the fever dropped to a mere 101 degrees and I survived … barely.

My brain was fried.  I couldn't read or write.  I didn't know who I was.
 Amnesia is very peculiar.  I didn't know my parents who seemed to have
appeared out of nowhere.  My father put up one of my paintings so I
could see it.  He said, I asked who painted it.  I said, 'That is a
wonderful picture, it tells me things about myself.  It is the best
picture in the whole world.  Who painted it?'

Afterwards, I was knocked by pneumonia, lost half of the teeth on my
right jaw and had to have a dental surgeon come in to operate.  I was a
child genius before it but now, had to work to learn things.  I told
everyone, for years, this actually helped me a great deal because it
forced me to think harder and longer in order to comprehend things and
the labor was where the value lay.  This meant, I had to really collect
information before figuring things out.

People are increasingly scared of the newest incarnation of this old
disease.  This is NOT AIDS.  That disease is extremely noxious, spreads
via sex and like all sexual diseases, is nearly impossible to get rid
of, runs along merrily for millennia and the more you keep people alive
who have it, the more they spread it.  All viral diseases of the Hong
Kong flu type race through populations and then vanish for several
generations.

Due to evolution, these flues have their own 'hockey stick' graphs.
They are not like sexual diseases that simply spread outwards,
relentlessly but fairly slowly.  These pig flu/avian flu viruses move at
tremendous speed and end just as swiftly.

When I got sick, the doctors sent samples to the Federal health
authorities for testing.  I saw a copy of the report.  It said, 'What
the hell is this?' written off on one side  of the report.  Viruses have
to go dormant and then mutate in order to flourish.  They are the
nearest life form on earth to the classic 'go to infinity, fast' model
that I talk about all the time.  This is rather funny because viruses
are one of the oldest life forms if not the oldest.  They prefer
non-oxygen environments and when mutations in the early earth waters
created photosynthesis organisms, these multiplied very rapidly, pushing
hard on the viral community.

Which retaliated by 'eating' the photosynthesis creatures.  This is why
viruses took up housekeeping inside of cellular living creatures.  And
like bacterium, they are activists who are tremendously successful.
Which is why they have these regular boom/bust cycles.  That is, not all
victims of viral attacks die.  And when they survive, they are protected
by antibodies [which are very, very ancient!] which is why viral kills
come in cycles that are often twenty years apart.  This is also why only
parts of the population are badly hit.

My parents, for example, as well as the oldest two doctors who attended
me, didn't get this disease at all!  Anyone my generation, though, was a
prime target.  So the doctors forbade anyone under thirty from visiting
me!  Heh! Once we were certain I was not a danger to others, I could
have visitors.

Running around in panic because of a viral surge is useless.  You can't
easily hide from it.  Sometimes, we must endure unpleasant visits from
our fellow living creatures.  Viruses are living things, by the way,
just as we are.  So is bacterium, plankton, et cetera.  All single
celled creatures once ruled this planet and used all of its resources
for multiplying and dividing.  We cannot banish them.

Looking at humans on a more cosmic scale, we are identical to them: we
are in the middle of the final stages of our own, epic 'hockey stick'
growth cycle and are heading towards a crash.  As do all living things
that end up  maxing out natural resources.  All of us fear death and
understandably so.  But Death will visit, invariably.  Even the greatest
religious figures who found religions die.

Even the very gods die, when the Zodiac stars shift over the eons.  We
cannot live life in fear of death.  During the Black Plague, a truly
noxious death visitation, people decided to stop wailing and crouching
in fear and began to do the opposite.  And the urge to celebrate, have
fun and live even as death swings its scythe is one of the more
admirable parts of our psychology.   Animals, when they get sick, just
lie down and passively die [except when they have rabies, another viral
innovation that has a mere single celled entity driving its victim to
work on behalf of the virus!].  Humans defy Death.

And this is why the latest flu story both worries me and yet, doesn't
worry me.  These things are inevitable.  I hope my own children don't
get it.  I hope, if they do, they get the care I got which saved my
life.  And I hope hospitals understand that the best way to deal with
this is to use OLDER PEOPLE TO CARE FOR THE SICK who are suffering from
this disease.

That is, there should be medical protocols for symptoms of this disease.
 If a patient shows any of these, only certain members of the staff
should attend.  My doctor and the nurse who got the Hong Kong flu from
me also got very, very sick.  If proper protocols were used in the
beginning, they would have been spared that suffering. But they did
suffer less than I and this is due them being cared for instantly
whereas, I didn't know I was ill until it became very obvious.

In conclusion, all of us survivors of the Hong Kong flu should be the
ones to care for the victims of this flu.  And we should respect viruses
more and know that they can evolve faster than we can fight them off.
This is their nature, they are one of the Elders on Earth.

_____

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H3N2
_____

Electronic mail address: emeinel at fairpoint.net

Regular mail address: EMS News, Post Office Box 483, Berlin, New York 12022

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