It’s been almost five years since I was last hospitalized (and that was a brief overnight stay due to a raging case of chicken pox). And unless I’m deathly ill or have some sort of foreign object protruding from my body, I’m going to do my best to avoid hospitals like, well, the plague. Health experts are projecting that antibiotic-resistant infections like MRSA could be killing more people than HIV. Equally disturbing is the fact that hospitals aren’t the only breeding grounds for these superbugs; a teenager recently died from MRSA that he probably picked up at school.
I’ll admit that I probably bear some responsibility for these germs run amok. Whenever I get a respiratory infection, I’m usually put on antibiotics as a precautionary measure. From a public health perspective, that’s probably not the smartest strategy. A MRSA infection would be pretty bad news for me on several levels. Besides the obvious health effects, my nurses probably wouldn’t come near me without full isolation suits. And if I became a carrier, I can forget about ever recruiting new caregivers.
Perhaps I need to give my immune system a workout to ensure I can defend myself from any microbial invasion. Parents, send your runny-nosed kids over here to breathe on me for an afternoon. We can watch Pixar movies together and eat from the same bowl of pudding. For good measure, I’ll even let them stick their fingers in my trachea. Kids always get a kick out of that.
