A Case of the Fl-YOU!

For whatever reason, it’s only been over the course of these recent months that I’ve become able to appreciate how much of a cesspool this town really is. People cough in my face as I walk by. They cough in lectures. They cough in indistinct, mysterious rooms somewhere in the building I’m in — and against all odds I can still hear them. They cough so hard that my friends look at each other and whisper about whether or not we should go back to check on them. If someone isn’t coughing, it seems they are fated to eventually begin, as they make the mistake of going somewhere, anywhere, and then they’re coughing. We’re all sick; St Andreans are single-handedly abating the evolutionary concerns of whatever little bug has taken us all down — this germ is the fittest and it is definitely surviving. 

Perhaps my sudden understanding of this town’s extraordinary microbial concentration has come from the fact that, this season, I was one of the infected. I was taken out. Assassinated by a truly lethal combination of mundane and inconvenient symptoms. On the leaderboards of all the colds I’ve had, this one has earned, at the very least, second place. And it’s off the back of this terrible, horrible, triumphant cold that I began to ask a question: who the f**k got me sick? 

Does it even matter? Would I blame them if I knew? I mean, I’ve been in their infectious shoes before. Recently I was walking with a friend who had a newly-arrived sore throat. I had just been to her birthday dinner the weekend before, still coughing away. It dawned on me that even though I was confident I wasn’t infectious anymore, she could’ve picked up the sore throat from me. “Oh no, it probably wasn’t you,” she said when I told her, “it doesn’t matter.” 

Whether or not I’d be as forgiving requires an examination of the problem. If somebody accidentally infects me with a cold, then it seems reasonable to remove blame from the equation entirely. I’m not in the habit of scaling the buildings on Market Street, posturing to assassinate the pedestrian who decided to launch a drive-by cough into my face. It’s when it’s a bit unclear whether or not they even cared about the possibility of infecting me that things get complicated. 

Sometimes, people I’m around — in close proximity, for dangerous amounts of time — will casually and guiltlessly mention a sore throat that just won’t quit them, or the cold they woke up with that morning. Everyone else around me smiles sympathetically and nods, cooing and commiserating. Not me. I’m seething, wide-eyed, in the corner. At the risk of seeming fundamentalist: what are you doing here? Leave! When did the comparatively low impact of certain illnesses make them appropriate to pass around? Suddenly I feel like it’s more my responsibility to accept the possibility of infection than it is theirs to try and avoid it. It becomes a game of maintaining nonchalant stoicism in the face of a threat: it feels weak, almost bourgeois, to be afraid of catching a cold. Sure, the optics of me suddenly getting up and leaving aren’t great. But, how is that where the wrongdoing lies? Is my sympathy meant to somehow override the very real possibility that in three to four days I’ll wake up with a cold my friend could’ve easily prevented just by sitting two or three seats away from me? 

Then, when you see them again, now fully ravaged by the gift they gave you, things get awkward. If you can remember the time they chose to expose you, then the continuity between action and consequence is too strong to remove blame entirely. You can clearly remember them coming to the pub with a fever that you now have — how can that not matter?

But then, I don’t really think about this all that often. At worst, a little flare-up of annoyance strikes me if I can somehow deduce that someone got me sick — but then I forget it. Probably because, with a bad enough cold, you stop caring about everybody else. Life revolves around when you can next reach your bed, how long you figure you have to sleep before symptoms improve, and what will actually happen if you take a dosage of paracetamol an hour or two earlier (no one can tell me). Hence the vicious cycle starts to take shape: when you’re the sick one, all that due ethical course doesn’t feel as essential as when you’re the one being exposed to illness. You just don’t have the energy for it — most of your time is spent just trying to negotiate all the pill-popping, soup-sipping, and desperate convalescence. 

I could split hairs forever in regards to what one should and shouldn’t do while sick  — but sick people have to be able to go outside, even if they’re hacking up a lung. Having conducted a tiny focus group, I think my friend Eleanor put it best: “If you had to stay inside at uni every time you had a cough, you’d never go outside.” 

So we’ll probably continue to be victims of other people’s microbes, and we’ll probably continue victimising others with our own. This town is an amusement park for the common germ, who will forever delight in hopping from host to host. My sore-throated friend was probably right: we’re better off just continually forgiving each other, and then waking up with a 40°C fever the next day. 

Illustration by Isabelle Holloway