I Share Something With The Greats.

What do Paul Dunbar, Washington Irving, Samuel Johnson, Franz Kafka, John Keats, D. H. Lawrence, Molière, George Orwell, Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry David Thoreau, Voltaire, a vast majority of Bronte Sisters, Igor Stravinsky, John Calvin and DJ Scheerer have in common?

If you guessed Tuberculosis, you get nothing!

TB is one of those diseases that you hear about, but seems like a distant fantasy; the plague of days gone by and people unknown. The sickness of those of lower socioeconomic status. What you didn't know is that TB is alive and well. "The Consumption," as I am privileged to now call it, is far from eradicated. Over half a million new cases of drug resistant TB are diagnosed worldwide every year.

I was almost one of them.

Upon arriving--home (oooh!) from my mission I had to get the mandatory TB skin test. This consists of the awesome idea of injecting a strain of the disease into your skin. If your body reacts to the infectious disease sitting in a bubble beneath the first few layers of dermis, it means your body recognizes the disease and you have most likely been exposed to TB.

I got the blob injected me and came back in a week, ready to proceed with life, when the nurse assigned to analyze the test recoiled when I pulled up my sleeve. There is only one way to describe her face during that moment. You know the look your mom gave you the first time you swore at her as a teenager? Not the look right after when she swats you with the fly-swatter, I'm talking about the exact moment the four letters leap from your tongue. The surprise and confusion and horror and disgust all at the same time? The nurse's face was something like that. I felt like I needed to apologize.

Anyway, after shooting some X-rays into my chest, giving me way too much literature and things to sign, solemnly interrogating/consoling me and sufficiently scaring the hell out of me, I was told I had latent TB and that I would most likely die of "The Consumption" sometime before my mid-life crisis. That is, if I didn't go on an intense regimen of antibiotics.

Eventually after making it to Provo, they did a blood test, and found that, no, I didn't have latent "The Consumption" after all. What most likely happened is that I had a false positive on my skin test. I don't know how my skin could have possibly gotten irritated and swollen after they stabbed me with a toxic disease-filled needle. It makes no sense at all.

I was relieved and saddened; knowing that I would live longer but most likely never achieve musical, religious, or literary greatness. So here's to all those great famous persons who've gone before and established the greatest heap of bloody handkerchiefs ever created. I may never write something worth reading, but I now know that if I ever need to get inspired, I'll simply go to sub-Saharan Africa or China and let someone cough in my face.

[Keep following, you might learn something.]