That sucks...

I’m honestly trying to stop chuckling long enough to figure out how to tell this story. Ok, so I had the flu last week right? My friend Sophie and I were discussing the blog posting I wrote about having canker sores. Amazingly, she’s never had any form of canker before, so I was trying to describe them. This turned out to be a more difficult task than I had at first thought. Describing a canker sore is way harder to do than you might think. Anyway, I was telling her that they’re harmless but really irritating, but I didn’t really know what caused them. So we decided to look them up on the Internet.

We found this WebMD site, and it’s a hypochondriac’s dream. You type in your symptoms and it comes up with possible diseases. Just by going with the symptom of mouth-sores we came up with Impetigo, Hand-Foot-and Mouth Disease, gingivitus, chicken-pox and oral cancer. Talk about a lot of potential troubles over a couple canker sores. But then, my eyes fell on the following entry:

Herpangina (Coxsackie virus). The virus most commonly occurs in the summer and autumn. It starts with a high fever, sore throat, headache, and a general feeling of illness (malaise). Usually, painful sores (ulcers) develop in the back of the mouth, especially the soft palate, within 24 to 48 hours of the fever. The illness lasts 7 to 10 days.

I couldn’t believe it. Can you imagine having sores in your mouth because you have the Coxsackie virus? Honestly… the Coxsackie virus. I was losing it. At first I thought it must be a gag, it was just so hard to swallow (so to speak), but I checked google and it’s for real.

"How’d you get those sores in your mouth?"
"Oh, I’ve got the Coxsackie virus."
"Oh… I see… so how’dya s'pose you got that?"
…
"What’s wrong with your mouth?"
"CoxSackie"
"Oh, that blows."

I mean, it’s just too much. Every time I think about it, I start laughing. "Oh, I’d love to go with you guys, but I’ve come down with the Coxsackie virus." There’s just no end to the humour. And really, the funniest part, is that those symptoms pretty much describe the flu that I had. So you never know, maybe I had the Coxsackie virus…I mean, I doubt it, but you never know right? Sometimes I do get pretty drunk...