Life of a Blogger is a weekly meme hosted by Novel Heartbeat. Every week there's a new topic, not related to book blogging. This week's topic is the other side of last week's: Fears. (For a full list of topics - past and future - go here.)
Well, this should be an easy topic for me! I'm not what you might call the courageous sort. I'm not a total wimp, but I'm not about to climb about in the skies like these blokes:
My fears are rather pedestrian, really: heights, spiders, poisonous snakes, zombies, serial killers, torture, losing people I love, being forced to eat haggis. There's one that, I admit, is a bit ridiculous an disproportionate - ebola. Now, I know, you're rolling your eyes and thinking how sick you are of hearing about it. But my ebola fear stretches back much further than this most recent (and most deadly) outbreak to, appropriately, a book. This book, to be precise:
I read The Hot Zone in high school (I'd read The Andromeda Strain, which led me to other books along the same line) and what I read truly terrified me. For those of you who don't know much about the disease that is currently ravaging affected populations in West Africa, it's horrific. It starts off with symptoms similar to the flu, if more intense. Fever, muscle pain, headache. It then quickly progresses to vomiting, diarrhea, a severe rash (trust me, you don't want to Google image that shit), and impaired kidney and liver function. In some cases it can cause both internal and external bleeding - I remember seeing pictures of victims with blood leaking from their eyes, nose and ears. There is no vaccine or cure, and, depending on the strain, it can be fatal in up to 90% of cases.
That said the chances of an outbreak happening in the developed world are very low. It's only contagious once symptoms occur and isn't airborne. If it were to make it here, it would likely be quickly contained because our medical systems are so much better equipped (ironically) to deal with this kind of outbreak. But that doesn't change the fact that hundreds have died from or are currently battling this disease in terrible conditions with little hope of survival.
So yeah, I find that pretty scary.
What about you guys? Fears? Paranoias? Irrational aversions? Share in the comments!
