Good morning! This is you drug-crazed motorcycle pilot speaking.
It is time to take off your Netflix-Showmax-Disney plus apnoea mask and feel your pillows, bedding, load-shedding lamp — you know, like real things.
Scarlet fever. It’s not about women finding men in red uniforms hot.
Louise Carter writing for Liverpool Online Scholarship says “female enthusiasm for men in red coats” was a racy topic in late 18th century online media at the time — letters, diaries, newspapers, plays and novels.
“Propaganda played on it and commentators and satirists often noted it with a mixture of bemusement and envy, characterising it as ‘scarlet fever’.
“The association of martial service with female admiration offered clear benefits as a recruitment tool for the military, but it also presented significant potential dangers to men and women alike.”
Today my elbow burns in resentment — and love for Scarlet fever — as it has for 10 days.
I have been in a brutal war with myself all this time. My enemy is the bottom-feeder pathogen streptococcus.
“Strep” bacteria charges across your skin, takes out the defences at a scratch or little cut, and does this sci-fi thing — it morphs like an alien into a zillion clones and streaks through your body, like boom!
You are a red Vienna, full of galumphing, thwocking Lurtzs and Balrogs (this is a Lord of the Rings reference for you non-wokus ballies).
When my doc peered into my face and said: “This is very, very serious boet!” I took fright. My mate, the healer and historian, has seen a lot of people die and is not prone to hyperbole.
I chomped my dreaded antibiotics and retired to bed where I lay tied up for six days as my elbow and arm blew up like a well-cooked pork sausage.
I was ordered by the doc to lie at home with the infected armed raised high, or else it would be done at hospital as the meds were delivered intravenously from a drip on a stand.
Bleak. Pause for thought.
The landlady’s clothes horse did the job. I rigged a rough pulley system with two handcuffs at the mobile end made from army-brown hiking socks.
There I lay, not waving, not drowning, but arm held high, and at the end a withered, pale, drained claw, like vine roots in winter.
The battle raged on. Within hours fever spread. With it went my memory.
The only parts I really remember were that I had a night nurse by my side who emotionally drew the sting and made me feel comfortable and safe. Did I dream that?
“Boet, that’s what saved you!” exclaimed the doc, referring to the laundry-styled torture contraption.
“But now you need to keep the arm raised from the elbow.”
So I went home with another course of anti-bac pills and tied myself to the faux vintage curly bedstead with my sister’s scarf for a few more days.
I had time to think. No, not about S&M, though pictures suggest otherwise.
About 40 days ago an itch started on the elbow. It was checked out and nothing untoward was noted.
But that itch never went away and was soon a little 3mm-wide abrasion. I was swimming in the ocean a lot.
On Monday, September 12, my crew of ducks and the odd males entered the sea at Orient Beach — and we knew, sewage!
The smell, the opaque green colour. We know. But we swam, showered, gargled with whizzo.
By the next day, streptococcus had reinforced its military nest in my elbow and was sending out its army of Orcs and Zorgs. I could barely rest the elbow on the desk.
By Wednesday it was huis-toe boedie. I was not waving, I was drowning.
But Deloris got me home.
I am up and finding out more.
“When raw sewage contaminates the aquatic environment, pathogens can be transmitted through the water to those who use the water for swimming, boating, and fishing, causing a range of potential risks”, wrote Yuyang Xie and eight others in a scientific report on Nature.com.
Back in 1973, Judith Cohen and Hillel I Shuval wrote in a paper titled Coliforms, fecal coliforms, and fecal streptococci as indicators of water pollution: “The presence and survival of coliforms, fecal coliforms, and fecal streptococci were studied in sewage treatment plants, heavily polluted rivers, a lake, and other drinking water sources.
“In all cases the fecal streptococci were generally more resistant to the natural water environment and to purification processes than the other indicator organisms and, at points distant from the original source of pollution were often the only indicators of the fecal nature of the pollution.”
They went as far as to say that finding the strep is the first indicator of “probable virus content in lightly contaminated water”.
So people, follow the strep and abort the mission on discovery.
This a vacuous comment. Sewage pours into our ocean from Hood Point, to Buffalo River, Blind river, Bats’ Cave, the Ihlanza, Nahoon, the little stream at Bonza Bay, Quinera and
leaks into our dams which store drinking water.
We are in the sh*t people, and who says this more than we do?
The government. Their weekly water research stats show six or more BCM plants in distress, and infrastructure officials have stated baldly that there is no money to fix these open social wounds.
So we don’t back down. I follow Mandela’s favourite editor and adviser Anthony Heard, 84, who said: “Don’t give up!”
Live in the limnic zone, operate, activate. There are good people in the system and there are gangsters with their fists clenched about the public purse and hearts.
It is time to get ever smarter people. These gangsters spend their lives finding new ways to plunder and decimate.
These blood-soaked scarlet scoundrels need to be defeated. Non-violently. But geskorsed from our constitutional democracy.
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