May
08
Still Alive, Despite the Swine Flu/H1N1 Pandemic
ByAs far as I can tell, only a few expats have caught the first available plane out of Guatemala to rush home in an attempt to avoid Swine Flu. As for me and mine, we’re still here and as healthy as ever. I came across a blogger who posted a list of all the things he had survived, and it inspired me to make my own list of the things I’ve managed to survive over the last few decades:
- 1970s Global Cooling
- 1990s Global Warming
- The Tylenol Scare
- Shooting BB guns at friends-and them shooting back
- Shooting paintball guns at friends-and them shooting back
- Shooting bottle rockets at friends-and them shooting back
- Shooting Roman candles at friends-and them shooting back
- The hole in the ozone layer
- SARS
- Bird Flu
- Drinking from a garden hose (in the US)
- 14 shots of Tequila in Panama, 1993
- 21 pieces of pizza, Phoenix, 1983
- Chicken Pox
- Poison Ivy
- Repeated Chicken Bus rides
- Eating food from a street vendor in Mexico City
- 10 days of explosive diarrhea
- Halloween candy without checking for needles or poisons
- Repeated flights in small, single-engine aircraft
- Learning to fly small, single-engine aircraft
- Stumbling Walking the Freedom Trail, Boston, at 3am in the morning
- Riding the NYC subway at 1am in the morning
- Breaking a thermometer in my mouth, 1978
- Stepping on a rusty rake, barefoot 1980
- Maxing the speedometer in my OldsmoBuick at 130mph between Nogales and Tucson
- Y2K
- Lots of McDonalds’ double cheeseburgers
- Lots of raw fish
- A mother-in-law
- Sticking a paper clip in an electrical outlet, 1981
- 3 months in a cave 10km from the DMZ, Korea
- 3 days in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina
- 1 week in Fayettenam, NC
- 7 bachelor parties, 3 as best man
- Lead-based paint
- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Obama
- Riding motorcycles (without helmet)
- Riding ATVs (without helmet)
- Riding bicycles (without helmet)
- Skateboarding (without helmet)
- Taking aspirin on an empty stomach
- Putting a plastic bag over my head
- Repeated 6+ earthquakes in Guatemala
Hopefully I’ll add fewer things to the list over the rest of my life than are already there. What’s your list look like?
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8 Comments
May 8th, 2009 at 9:21 am
LOL! Great list!
I forgot to add sushi, 2 dozen glazed doughnuts from Krispy Kreme, and — I got put in jail for going 130 mph in Shelby County Alabama when I was 19!
Thanks for sharing your list!
May 8th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
I would love to post my list on my blog, but my dad reads it. And it includes things like being attacked at 2 am while walking home from working at a bar in Antigua, riding a motorbike with no helmet and two small children, a bout of salmonella so severe the doctor said I would have been dead in 48 hrs if I hadn`t gone in for medical attention (most of my organs were already on the verge of shutting down), 2 years of living with e.coli in my kidneys, eclampsia (not pre, but full-blown eclapmsia) with my firstborn, severe hemorrhaging after the birth of my second child, and more than one fistfight. That`s all since I moved here.
Ok, I`m really, really curious about this 3 months in a cave business. What on earth did you do in a cave for three months?
May 8th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
I live in downtown Guatemala, which is considered pretty unsafe, but I like it and have never had any problem at all. Having said that, just breathing the fumes from the cars and buses all around the country is danger enough! My lungs are probably coal black and in some sort of pre-cancerous stages.
May 8th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
A long time ago I worked for Uncle Sam and I was sent there as part of a war game to anticipate an invasion by North Korea. It sounded cool at the time but no matter how well a cave has been dug, it still leaks. We worked 18 hours a day, six days a week. It wasn’t real fun.
May 9th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
6+ earthquakes? Were those the recent ones? I heard those were not full-on earthquakes..
or do you mean 1976??
also, Trudy mentioned “downtown Guatemala”. What does that mean? Zone 1? Zone 10? No worries, your lungs probably already adjusted lol.
Anyways, greetings from http://www.socialnerdia.com
May 9th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Yes, in the last two months we’ve had two earthquakes of greater than 6 on the Richter scale. The last one was 3 May, which was a 6.1 and originated near Santiago Atitlan.
It seems like Trudy mentioned she lives in Zone 1.
May 11th, 2009 at 6:08 am
Great list Mark. But, have you survived Obama or ran away from him?
May 11th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
I’ll assert the 5th Amendment on that one.