Pandas and E. Coli

You know how family members like to attach labels to you practically from the day you’re born, and how, as you get older, you eventually discover they’ve been attached with super glue? No matter how far you travel or how many things you do in life, things that prove you’re not what they think you are, you just can’t unstick those old adjectives. And any far-more-appropriate new ones that might come along post age 21 are always merely attached with that cheap, clear kindergarten glue, sliding off your skin the minute you get caught in an unexpected downpour. You try to salvage them, but the ink has run, and although you’d like everyone to start thinking of you as the family genius, you discover that “brilliant” has become "ANT." Great. You’re the family ant.

My family has stuck many labels on me throughout my life. One of them “Panda-obsessed” has faded with time, probably because it was one of the first. It's one of the few that I actually kind of miss, as it was very appropriate. I was given a large, stuffed panda when I was around two years old, and he held a prime spot on my bed until I was in my twenties. I adored him and, by association, all pandas. Summer travels to visit relatives in England and Canada were tragic, because I couldn’t bring along Panda (he was too big and awkward for parents who, with four kids and all their books and clothes, had enough to handle). Consolation when I was five years old was that we were taken to the London Zoo where I could see my first live panda, who did not cooperate, staying curled up in the far corner of the cage the entire time we were there -- I know this, because I kept dragging everyone back to check -- so that it just looked like any old furry black and white ball to me. Despite this disappointment, and the label that can barely be read, my love of pandas is something that hasn't faded much.

I was also labeled the family hypochondriac, a label that was apparently written in indelible ink and stuck on with two applications of super glue. This label is a little more dubious. Yes, I did exhibit an unusually keen interest in my health classes and their textbooks (often reading way ahead in them for “fun”), and I always seemed to be waiting to exhale, searching for the diseases I knew I couldn’t possibly have. For instance, I was thrilled to discover at age twelve, that not only could I not possibly have syphilis, but that I also wasn’t likely to ever get it, since sex was "gross," and I was never going to do that.

However, I definitely am not your standard run-to-the-doctor-with-every-symptom hypochondriac, and most of the time (you know, when I don’t have a strange itch that won’t go away and could be skin cancer, or a headache that must indicate a brain tumor, or an odd pain in my side that just might be kidney failure), I don’t think that much about my health. As a friend of mine recently emailed me, just before racing off to his doctor to have yet another life-threatening malady examined, "Hypochondriac? You call yourself a hypochondriac? That's a laugh. You don't even know what being a hypochondriac means." I've quite obviously outgrown my childhood hypochondria, but that label ain't coming off. Still, I'm always thrilled to read about some horrible disease I can't possibly have.

Enter this recent E. coli infestation. I, who don’t tend to like to buy spinach in bags, because there’s just so much of it, and it seems to wilt within a day of having been opened, meaning we’d have to eat copious amounts of it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in order for it not to go to waste, was very relieved to find this was the reported source of recent outbreaks. I haven’t cooked anything calling for spinach in ages; no way could I possibly have to worry about E coli. But then, late Saturday morning, I got sick. Nothing as severe as the descriptions in the news, but still, my symptoms were similar. Maybe I had a very mild case. And I know I hadn’t eaten any spinach, but maybe that radicchio I’d had Friday night that had tasted a little funny was the cause. Maybe I was the first case to be infected from a different leafy vegetable. I took to my bed, feeling twinges in my lower back. Could that be an indication that my liver was malfunctioning?

I slept most of the afternoon and woke up feeling somewhat better, convinced I wasn’t going to die after all. This was when Bob came in with a package from my mother. Packages from my mother are an amusing source of conversation in this house. She seems to spend a lot of time looking around the house for odd things to send to me. I never know if it’s going to be something wonderful (an old scrapbook I thought had been forever missing or some cool kitchen gadget) or something to which the only appropriate response is “huh?!” (an automatic envelope opener or some stupid article of clothing I’m still embarrassed to think I wore all the time when I was fifteen and can't believe she still had). This time, she hit the jackpot. She’d sent me a lovely green T-shirt she’d picked up on her trip to Peru that was too small for her, and an old, paperback picture book that was falling apart. Guess what it was. A Book about Pandas. That label must not be completely faded yet.

I settled in for the rest of the evening, nursing my mild case of E coli and looking at pictures of some very sweet pandas.