oo new things to look forward to

melbourne this weekend although hmm AND just confirmed i have 29th & 30th of Dec off therefore lorne here i come.

yay!

oh and i forgot to mention the premiership....it's ours baby :)

Hypochondriacs

ok so 2 weeks ago when i was suffering from pleurisy, i stepped on a really long tack that was sitting on my bedroom floor, it kinda went about 5mm into my foot. At the moment i jabbed my foot i immediately thought about the events of the previous week, ie when a box of tacks fell on my floor and my first thought about that was 'that would really hurt if i stepped on one of them'...my second thought was, it's a long bend down.. i'll just walk around them and pick them up when i'm a bit more motivated. The second thought after jabbing my foot was tetanus. i majored in immunology back in my uni days, and although i found this to be the most interesting subject i ever studied at university, it was also quite taxing on my mental health. Each lecture focused on a different horrific disease that people around the world suffer from and each time it went a bit like this...

lecturer: 'Ebola...Ebola liquefies your internal body organs, it festers for about 11 days and then you are dead meat, there is no cure, initially sufferers complain of headache and muscle aches..."
tani’s inner monologue: 'hmm i had a headache yesterday and my arm was sore! hmm Jesus!!!'
lecturer: 'but it ebola is extremely rare and is reported in epidemics'
tani's inner monologue: 'hmm haven’t heard of any ebola epidemics of late, phew'

something like that... a string of similar lectures (rabies, tetanus, tuberculosis, polio, yellow fever etc etc ) began some sort of mindset that the world was rife with horrible disease, survival is impossible and our only purpose on earth was to serve as a host to some disgusting little pathogen that would multiply and overtake you causing unimaginable pain and death. The worst was the rabies lecture......if you had to compile a list of your favourite infectious diseases, rabies would be sitting somewhere near the bottom right next to organ liquefying ebola....the lecturer made this gruesomely clear. What the lecturer didn't make clear is that Australia is completely free of rabies due to quarantine, most people are well aware of this fact which is probably why he didn't mention it, but for the blondes in the room he should've. I walked out of the rabies lecture convinced it was only a matter of days before i sat on my death bed drooling, convulsing with extreme pain, biting everything in sight and screaming at the sight of water. A week or so earlier i had taken my new cat, taki, to the vet to get all of her vaccinations after taki bit and scratched the hell out of the vet, the vet told me she had never treated a more vicious cat and that wild cats were more tolerant. On completion of the rabies lecture it was this fact along with a couple of headaches that had me so convinced. I've never experienced such overwhelming fear and after a couple of days of insomnia, google searches 'rabies symptoms' and avoiding taki like the plague i decided the fear far out weighed my embarrassment and i rang the vet for some information on rabies, she then told me because of the quarantine laws there was no such thing as rabies in australia. oh quarantine, very nice!

I suffered a lot of anxiety attacks that year which immediately stopped after i finished my immunology exam.. ie until 4am this morning when i was awoken by my sore, stiff jaw and i remembered my tetanus lecture and the fact that i stepped on a tack a few weeks ago, despite the shots and booster shots i've received i'm still a little rattled... Coincidentally tilda (a well know hypocondriac) pricked her finger on a rose bush yesterday and immediately thought she could become a victim of tetanus too. Of course thinking she had SARs back when it was an epidemic was a completely normal reaction under the circumstances. luckily we escaped rabies and SARs but God bless us, we could now be coming down with tetanus.