Like A Poussin With Its Head Cut Off

Okay, so after a couple of conflicting medical opinions, it now appears I probably do have chicken pox, although the antivirals I’ve been taking have rendered it incredibly wimpy – poussin pox, if you will. It looks like I’ll have to miss work till the end of this week so that other people in my office don’t end up doing the chicken dance too, but I really can’t see these wimpy pox surviving the weekend. Alec is still considered infectious because of a lousy two (TWO?!) spots which haven’t scabbed over yet, but I hope I’ll be able to see him quite soon. My mum continues to show no signs of infection but she’s not out of the woods yet.

So apart from occasionally channelling Lady Macbeth and whiling away the afternoons with a warm sleepy cat on my belly, I have no other real agenda for the coming week apart from deciding how I want to celebrate my birthday the week after.

Very pleasantly, my problem right now is choosing between an excess of options. The day itself is sorted because of the Tortoise gig at night. Surprisingly, even Zouk has a half-interesting lineup for that weekend, with Chicks On Speed on Friday and Grandmaster Flash on Saturday. And lastly, Tiramisu and Astreal (my new favourite local band, sorry Observatory, I’ll still support you but walls of crashing sound with ethereal vocals by a hot girl playing an oversized turquoise guitar straight out of the Jetsons kinda push my buttons a bit more) will be playing at the first RNDM night at Mox, also on Saturday.

With so much to do, I’m reconsidering my original idea of just throwing a house party, simply because I don’t see how I can fit one in.

The Sky Hasn’t Fallen Just Yet

This isn’t much of an update, but here goes anyway.

On Saturday evening, I noticed an outbreak of spots I didn’t remember having on Friday. For most people in my situation this would be clear evidence of chicken pox, but for someone like me who has lived my whole life with eczema (except for those four blessed alabaster years in England; now I think about it, I really should have given in to Alec’s miniskirt requests while they were still a viable option), it could just be a exceptionally bad skin day.
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I Don’t Feel Like Chicken Pox Tonight

I suppose a fall had to come some time.

Alec has come down very unexpectedly with the chicken pox, and the two people he spends the most time with in my family – my mum and I – are the ones who haven’t had it yet.

Yesterday my mum and I went on a frustrating trek to get post-exposure treatment for ourselves, where all but one of the doctors we went to weren’t aware that there was even such a thing as post-exposure prophylaxis for chicken-pox. (We knew this because my uncle used to work at the Communicable Disease Centre.)

Finally, in a clinic near work I found a doctor who was aware that vaccination could be used, but wasn’t sure about antiviral medication. I gave him the relevant materials which my uncle had emailed us, and after studying them he decided that the best treatment for me would be antivirals, although for someone with my level and time of exposure to the virus there’s no guarantee anything will work. Meanwhile, my uncle had decided that the best treatment for my mum would be vaccination. And then they found out that aborted foetuses are used in the vaccine, so she now refuses to take it, and will just wait and see if she gets the disease.

I’m worried about Alec, who is alone in his flat with no one around to check on him, and cut off from his job-seeking because he doesn’t have Internet access. I don’t want my mum to get chicken pox because she’s 62 and I’m worried about complications (which can be pretty bad for adults). I don’t want to get chicken pox because for the first time in a while I was actually planning to not have a shitty birthday this year, and now the uncertainty of it all means I can’t really plan anything until it will possibly be too late to plan anything. Also, any disruption in my pupillage may fuck up my trip to England in June and attendance at Tamara’s wedding. Also, there is the trifling matter of the entire swing dance camp Alec may have infected over the weekend, including two pregnant women and a 91-year-old. It’s possible they’re already immune, but he called the studio to warn them anyway.

Obviously there are bigger problems in the world than these, but that doesn’t make them any more fun to deal with right now. Which is why I could only manage a wry laugh when I found a new link to my site from sockparade this morning, with this commentary:

Supergirl.
Found by a pal when looking for Ayn Rand quotes. She doesn’t refer to herself as Supergirl or anything, that’s just what we called her until we knew her name was Michelle. She’s been to more countries and done more great things in her life than I could even think up. She has a ridiculously huge knowledge base of good music and good reads which makes anyone a cool cat in my book. Why do people from Singapore have such interesting lives? She doesn’t write as consistenly as Dooce but read this and you’ll be hooked.

I’m extremely flattered by the kind words, but I can’t say I’m feeling that super right now. :(