Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Ebola: Let me get this straight...

          A man enters an emergency room with a fever, everyone says "ummmm...." and they send him home. Later he is admitted to the hospital; nurses using quarantine protocols, make a mistake and are immediately quarantined. The man's family is quarantined. One of the nurses travelled, so they start back-tracking and identifying who she came in contact with and ask them to monitor their symptoms. We guess they did, and everyone's OK. Everyone who knew they had been at risk, anyway.
          Now, a nurse has gone to Liberia to help people with Ebola. Why? She is compassionate, she knows their lives are it risk, she wants to help them. She comes home. She knows she isn't contagious, and has decided not to voluntarily follow the State Health Dept.'s recommendations. Her compassion for others is no longer as strong as her certainty that she has Ebola all sussed out.
          In January, a student registers at HACC. I have no way of knowing he was in a foreign country and travelled on an airplane with a person who decided that waiting 10, l4, or 21 days to make sure there was no virus incubating in his or her body was unreasonable, inconvenient, excessive - whatever. This person comes down with a horrendous fever and coughs on my future student's in-flight dinner. This student starts my class 2 days later. He or she is respected, valued, and instructed to the best of my ability. Fourteen days into class, the student stops attending. Two days after that government health workers enter my class in haz-mat gear and start taking our temperatures. They suggest we suspend the class for 2 weeks and start making a list of the people we have been in contact with since the beginning of the semester.
          Question: who should be at the top of my list? My bed-ridden, 90-year old mother, or my son, and my husband. I guess all 63 students in my other classes, the people in the English Department, my co-workers at Kitchen Kettle....
          Thank God nobody violated that airplane traveller's Constitutional or Human or God-given Rights.  

          Today, I am not frightened. I will not live in fear. I know that anyone can die at any moment. I've heard that comforting solution to all life's problems. "You could be hit by a bus tomorrow! Worrying won't help." This is different. This is one of the few things in life that could be controlled - or at least suppressed! If I die of cancer, a heart attack, a bus - that's life! I accept that.
          The idea, however, that a person who could prevent infecting others decides he or she doesn't feel like following directions (I know a few people like that) and takes me and the people I love and work with down with me, well, I have a problem with that. I have a BIG problem with that.

          This much I know for certain. If there were any chance that I could possibly be a risk of infection to other people, I would do the quarantine. Hell, I'd probably double it just to be sure.