No really, she was.

But let me start in the beginning.  Not in the far beginning, but like, 11:07 yesterday.  I was at a local hospital in Boise, St. Al’s, there to get a Tdap booster vaccination and a round of typhoid pills because I secretly find immunization against infectious diseases to be dead sexy.  So sexy, I just made that shit bold.  And I made it bold because things like diphtheria and lockjaw are strong and stout.

Truthfully, I was there because I’m traveling to SE Asia in less than a month and I don’t feel like shitting out my intestines, watching them cascading like white streamers dropped from a ceiling during a New Year’s Eve party, down into a filthy squat toilet, only to be made filthier by my innards so that the next farang into the stall can step over my corpse and make a quip about vaccinations and not drinking the water.  But the joke is on you, Aussie or Brit or whomever the hell you are.  I NEVER drink the water.  My death was brought on by dysentery, dawg!  Also known as bloody flux.  So, in your face.  With my dead corpse.  Funny thing is, there are no vaccinations to stop the above scenario from occurring.  But some shots will prevent other, equally heinous deaths.  So it’s like a partial win.

So I get to the doctor’s office and they ask me all the pertinent hospitalish questions like “could you be pregnant?  could you be pregnant with triplets?  could you be pregnant with wombat triplets?” and so on and so forth.  I do my best to check all boxes “no”, even if they’re all, “hey, you’re declining treatment by checking this box ‘no'” and then I take the paper back from them and draw my own little box under that box and check that one “no” which means I double up my negatives like a pimp and affirm that I do want treatment.

And once all that is done, they ask what kinds of vaccinations I need.  And because I’m cool, I carry around a yellow, heavy card stock quarter fold of that good old International Certificate of Vaccination as approved by The World Health Organization.  Forget driver’s licenses and work badges on lariats.  This card backs up my name as a Nom Du Voyageur and if I’m hot enough for the French, I’m hot enough for the French Canadians.  I tell the nurse to hit me with a Tdap booster (us kids in the game know the abbrevs.  And us kids that invented the game know how to abbreviate abbreviations) and some typhoid pills and she’s all, aight.

Then, she talks about rabies.  And I will stand by the following conversation.  Because though parts of it never occurred, it all occurred in my head.

“Have you thought about rabies?” she asks.

I make a funny face, “I always thought absence made the heart grow fonder.  But that’s not the case in rabies.  You’re like, hey, fuck rabies.”

Then she completely ignores my joke and my swearing and mentions that I really should consider getting the three injections over 28 days to protect myself against rabies.  “If you’re going to be backpacking, you might want to get the shots.”

“How much?”

“$350.  Each.”

“Wha?” I say.  “I think it’s too expensive to not get rabies.  Plus, I do my best not to handle animals when I’m out of the country.  I don’t run down alley cats for snuggles.”

“Well try not to eat in front of them, either.”

“Don’t eat in front of rabid animals?  Do they become more incensed when you’ve got a Quarter Pounder in your hand?”

She laughs then and shakes her head at me.  “Just know that if you do get a bite or a scratch from an animal, treat it very seriously.  Scrub out the wound with soap for fifteen minutes.  A hard scrubbing.  Then get to a hospital within 24 hours for immunoglobulin.”

I assure her that I will follow her directions and get plenty of goblins and then tell her that monkeys scare me.  Not specifically because of rabies, but just in general.  They’re scary.

“They do carry rabies,” she says and without skipping a beat warns me that, “they can also give you herpes.”

“What, with raping?”

And then she shoves a needle in my bicep and makes me leave.

But before I go, I get my four pills to vaccinate myself against typhoid.  The shot would have only made me resilient, not immune, against the disease for two years while the pills last five.  Thing is, the pills are LIVE TYPHOID.  Sure, it’s a weakened strain, but that’s sort of like putting me in a cage with a tiger and telling me not to worry because he’s gorged himself on three peccaries today and he’s plum tuckered.  I WON’T FEEL BETTER ABOUT IT.

So then I wondered, while driving home and moving around my arm to get that achy I’ve-just-shot-up-with-three-deadly-diseases feel from out of my muscle, if I could possibly become like Typhoid Mary.  Because honestly, the most I know about typhoid as a disease is that there was a woman named Mary, and she had it or something.  Which is exactly zero knowledge about the disease.  Then I thought, it’s sad that she was a typhoid carrier.  Poor lady.

When I got home, I looked up the story behind Typhoid Mary.  Turns out her profession was being a cook.  And that her gallbladder was teeming with typhoid, which didn’t kill or harm her, but could be transmitted via the food she prepared for her clients.  I also put two and two together and realized she likely never washed her hands.  And when she was told she was a carrier and was making hundreds of people sick, even killing some of her clients, she was like, “whateves” and DID IT ANYWAY.

This is my pledge here and now.  If I take these pills and somehow become a carrier and my name is changed to Typhoid Erica and then I go to Borneo and spread typhoid to the rabid, rapey monkeys there, please know that I loved you all, even those of you I don’t know. Plus, I never meant to be the Sower of Death and Pain and Ickiness.

Anyway, for seriousness, that Mary Mallon was a beeyotch.