"Welcome to Plague Central! May I help you?"

[elionwyr]

Ya know how people say there are sick buildings, or work can make you sick?

I've had another 3-day-migraineish headache.
Yesterday, 2 coworkers went home sick with a nasty gastro-intestinal virus thang.
Today, a coworker basically collapsed - nasty reacton to various meds he's on.
(A little ironic, because during the AIDS awareness talk we attended Monday, bad drug interactions were discussed.)
And after he was carted away to the hospital (no word as of 2PM as to how he was), we heard him saying he had a staph infection on his face - which he gets every summer if he's out in the sun too much.

So now everyone's hysterical. "OH MY GOD WE'RE ALL BEING EXPOSED TO STAPH BECAUSE WE HAVE TO WORK ON HIS WORKLOAD AND NOW WE'LL ALL GET SICK AAAAAAUGH!!!!"

I pulled out a bottle of hand sanitizer and offered it to those who wanted to use it, and then said, "Yes, it's contagious. But apparently we've been exposed for, what, 3 years now, and no one's gotten sick."

No one was reassured.

Still.
Perfect ending to a "perfect" week.

Comments

[mrobenee-kelley.livejournal.com]

Tell your paranoid co-workers that Staph is lurking everywhere. It is normal for it to be floating around in the air, resting on your desk, whatever. Generally no one needs to worry unless they have a compromised immune system.

As for sick buildings, I do believe they exist. Every time I went to work at Baptist I got a stomach flu, or headache, or broken ankle. In fact everyone I worked with ended up sick after the work week was over...and they were lab workers with little or no contact with patients.

[elionwyr.livejournal.com]

re: sick buildings
Our last one was definitely one. With all the critters I care for and with working in Butterflies, I never sneeze. In that building? I sneezed all the time. And the ceiling had horrible leaks. The drop-ceiling tiles were always getting water-logged and falling apart.

I shudder to think of what we were breathing in.. :/

[malinaldarose.livejournal.com]

I'm reasonably certain that ours is a sick building -- it's airtight and has lousy maintenance. I haven't really been bothered by it, but others have -- and their problems cleared up when they quit/retired/were transferred to other sites.

[elionwyr.livejournal.com]

Ugh...
Glad you're unaffected!

[stevenglassman.livejournal.com]

Completely unrelated; I *love* that you have a Lex icon. Love love love it.

re: icon

[elionwyr.livejournal.com]

:)

She appears on my calendar page, too.

(Geeky Little Tangent: I'm so very glad they changed artists over at Gloomcookie, as Gebbia's art nearly made me stop buying the book..)

[katykate.livejournal.com]

re sick buildings

I work in a REALLY old hospital. So old, that the asbestos was just removed a year or so ago. I was getting sinus infections almost monthly. I've been off work since February -- not one sinus infection since.

Things that make you go "hmm.."

[elionwyr.livejournal.com]

..whuf..

[silme.livejournal.com]

I am a staph carrier. I have been since, at age seven, I developed a staph infection in my lymphatic system. I had an infected hangnail. I now have two surgery scars -- one around my elbow, the other on my underarm. I am deathly allergic to penicillin, the only antibiotic available then that would have cured it, so I had to have surgery. They removed my lymph nodes in that underarm, and that finally did it. But it makes me a staph carrier. Some of the allergy shots I received as a teen were pure staph -- I always had sore throats as a kid. Throat cultures showed that it was 94% staph...

I am not contagious except to any children I might give birth to. And since that has not happened and will not happen, I'm not contagious. ;)

Nowadays, there are more antibiotics available than in the '60s when I was a child. Did your colleagues not want to open the mail during the Anthrax scare? ;)

[elionwyr.livejournal.com]

re: anthrax scare

Ohhhhh...they just LOVE a good fit of hysteria.
So yeah. There was upset.
Heck, when a local paper ran a picture of the WTC towers falling and pointed out a face in the smoke, all I heard for hours was, "OH MY GOD IT WAS SATAN WE'RE IN THE END DAYS AAAAAUGH!!!"

Note to self:
Get better earplugs for office wear.

[silme.livejournal.com]

Geez... My brother works around Broad and Chestnut. His reaction on 11 Sept.: Why are they closing down Independence Hall? Shouldn't they be more worried about Liberty Plaza? ;) But then he's cynical. Like me. :)