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Parents Lose Battle Of Germ Warfare

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Been immune to sickness most of your adult life? If you have kids now, all bets are off.

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By MICHAEL WINTER

mwinter@tampatrib.com

Published: January 30, 2009

Germs. They're everywhere.

That's what my mother said. That's what your mother said. And for the most part they were right. We're wallowing in microscopic menaces. E. coli. Staphylococcus. Meningitis. Salmonella. That flesh-eating superbug that liquefies bodies in seconds. Well, maybe not so much the latter, but it's out there somewhere, waiting for its chance to jump out from behind a tree or fall on us from above with cytoplasmic fury and flailing flagellums.

At any given moment, approximately 632 gazillion germs are huddled behind 632 gazillion little doors, poring over charts and maps and reconnaissance reports, plotting new strategies for advancing their fiendish agendas, agendas that - according to their own literature - include "no gland left unswollen" and "a chicken in every pox."

Despite this unrelenting onslaught, I was illness-free for most of the '90s. Sure, occasionally I'd get the sniffles or a tickle in the back of my throat. I may even have had a touch of the heave-hoes once or twice. But I was always able to shake off whatever ailed me and move on with my day, confident my defenses would make short work of any invader foolish enough to tangle with an immune system as robust as mine.

Then my daughter started preschool and my illusion of invulnerability received a fatal dose of reality. It expired in a cold sweat, huddled under a quilt, a bottle of Nyquil clutched in one trembling hand and a television remote in the other.

I should have seen it coming. It wasn't as if I didn't know the dangers. I'd heard stories from other parents, dire warnings about the effects of sharing playthings and airspace with the unwashed masses; of sneezes to the face being the standard greeting between classmates; of licking being a popular pastime; of head lice, ringworm, whooping cough and something called scabies, a malady I had only the vaguest familiarity with - something to do with wild monkeys and iodine deficiency and swimming in swamp water without earplugs.

But I assumed all that talk was nothing more than whining from the immunologically deficient. My kid might get sick. My wife might get sick. But nothing coming out of a mere preschool would ever have the potency to lay me low. After all, I had avoided contracting swine flu, bird flu, Legionnaire's disease, mad cow disease and a long list of fevers, including but not limited to: yellow, scarlet, cabin and Pac-Man. Bring on your worst, I sneered. I'm not afraid.

Three weeks later I was sprawled across the couch watching the ceiling fan spin psychedelic patterns across the room while the recliner mocked me in Swedish and the cats chased each other through marshmallow windmills. Of course I was a tad feverish at the time, my core temperature hovering somewhere between defrost and self-clean, so some of what I saw might not have been real.

I remained in that state several weeks (or 12 hours, if you can believe my wife's outlandish claims) and recovered my ability to form coherent sentences only after receiving an experimental vaccine from shadowy government agents (or a half-bowl of chicken broth, again according to my questionable source).

OK, I reasoned afterward, that episode was a fluke, a lucky hit. Like a boxer pulling himself up after a near-knockout, I pointed at my chin and said, "Bet you can't do that again."

Since that day, I have been sick a total of 57 times. I've had sore throats, clogged sinuses, upset stomachs, aches and pains too numerous to catalog, and something called "wandering bladder," which is even worse than it sounds. My once buff immune system has been reduced to a 90-pound weakling that gets sand kicked in its face by any microbial bully with something to prove. My lungs have become flophouses for every transient cootie this side of Mucusville.

The ironic thing about all this is that my daughter and wife have been far healthier during the past few years than I have. I suspect a nefarious collusion between their immune systems and the germs, a back-room agreement to provide transport to my venerable borders in exchange for their continued neutrality. I'm not bitter. But I am sniffily.

I'm hoping I'll be able to hold out until next fall, when my preschooler enters the (relatively) sterile halls of elementary school. Until then, I'll just have to wear earplugs when I'm swimming, take iodine supplements every day and avoid wild monkeys.

I may be flu fodder, but there's no way I'm getting scabies.

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