the evil that is hand soap

Take heed, all you first world countries, with your Clorox Cleanup and your Dettol. Throw them out! Let your babies eat dirt!

When we arrived in Dubai, we were warned that the first six months were going to be dicey: newcomers always seem to spend their first half year here sick. I think it only took me four months to run the gauntlet, and a miserable four months they were. I would lie in bed at night and could feel some new sick descending upon me from the air conditioning vents. My first trip to visit friends in Abu Dhabi, I felt awful. My husband accused me of being a party pooper, and everyone wondered why I was such a distant snob, but fact was, I was running a high fever and had no business sleeping anywhere but my own bed, with the curtains drawn and the lights off. At night I would get the chills and then soak the borrowed bed with my sweat. When we finally returned to Dubai, a quick glance at my tongue was enough to send me to the pharmacy for antibiotics. Strep. Don't need a culture, thanks, the white rocks on my tongue are proof enough. Then my son and husband caught it, too. Pass around pack, family size bucket o' antibiotics, drugs for everyone!

I was surprised, as time went by and the illnesses got nastier, that I'd never had any of this yuk as a kid. I brought walking pneumonia with me to Paris for Christmas, and expelled a quantity of nuclear green phlegm of a colour and viscocity I was quite frankly fascinated by in a morbid sort of, oh wow, I didn't know it could get that colour sort of way. I was disgusted by my body's lack of grit, its inability to shake off these sicknesses -- I had always been a healthy person, more or less. Why on earth was I catching all of this now?

I blame Dial soap. I blame Madge and her 'you're soaking in it' Palmolive with its softeners and dish cleaning strengths. I blame Chlorox and detox and botox and box tops. We're just too damned clean. Perfectionists. Americans kill off all the germs before they have the chance to infect us and make us stronger. Children here play with garbage they find in the parks, straws and lids and cups and whatever else they can use to make their fantastic sand constructions. Americans don't even have trash in the parks. Americans put their trash back into whatever plastic bags they have on hand and cart it out with them. Americans would bag up their trash if they'd picnicked in a landfill. Woodsy Owl taught us 'give a hoot, don't pollute!' and an entire generation of children was inculcated between episodes of Aquaboy and singing along to Schoolhouse Rockwith the compulsive desire to put our trash in the proper recepticles.

Over the months, we could feel ourselves getting stronger. We learned to recognize the onset of various aches and pains, what sore throat was cause for alarm, which one could be evicted. Apparently, the men's lavs resound with operatic human purgings not confined to the toilets. The ladies rooms are not nearly as frank in their expulsions. Men hawk, spit, heave and retch after every ablution in an effort to rid themselves of the funk that might just kill them. You'll see men driving down the road, slowly, door open for a leisurely spit. It's not rude, here. It's healthcare at its most basic. And they are right, you know. There is an illness here that starts with a sore throat, and a gob of something lodged behind one tonsil. You've got about 24 hours to locate the bug and spit it out before all hell breaks loose and you're lost to fever and pain and delusion for days. Yes. You can spit out sick if you catch it in time.

This past week has been a refresher course in misery for me. I've had the stomach bug crossed with some sort of upper resperatory infection and a swivelling head that puts an English Beat song running nighmarish through my brain, turning me into a swivel head, with a brain that crashes resoundingly into the surfaces of my skull every time I move my eyeballs. I've eaten nothing but ramen noodles for four days, hacked up a lung, and shuffled with an old woman's intensity from bed to toilet to kitchen. I've been sick. My son has turned shaman, blowing on my head to make the bo-bo's all better, patting me and telling me it's going to be all right. I know the contents of his doctor's kit intimately, and have received innumerable shots (this will hurt mama, but only for a little bit, he tells me). I have wept in pity for myself and forced another sip of water past lips that want nothing to do with the finer arts of self-preservation. I've watched how the artificial light changes in the city through the night, and spent those lonely three in the morning coughing bouts on the sofa in the living room, wondering how many more days I've got to suffer. Just as the stomach eased up, the fever, with its aches chills stabbing pains, began. I threw my hands up well, i didn't throw my hands up that would have knocked me back into bed and probably caused me to pass out, I staggered around the mall and watched my son play in the snow from the other side of the glass. Cause I might be sick, but I'm not delirious. Much. I know better than to go play in the snow when my tiny little Prada purse is too heavy to carry.

So, while I have felt justified in yearning for a glimpse of myself, deathly white, in antique silk and lace, elegant and helpless on the divan, a wan hand pressed dramatically to my forehead, coughing delicately into a monogrammed kerchief, I am instead covered in ink and little pieces of paper as my three year old and I create a scary forest filled with monsters and wolves (poor, maligned wolves). I should be in bed. Really. Life however, has decided that I've been flat on my back long enough, and my motherly duties wait for no virus.

At least I'm no longer too proud to spit. And my kid can eat all the sand he wants. I don't want him to have to get sick like this. That which does not kill us... wasn't killed off by anti-bacterial soap in the first place.