I was stranded for three weeks off the Ivory Coast living on meager rations of fish and chips provisioned me by a local tribe of Liberian tree surgeons. One sunny morning as I was studiously sampling local herbal remedies with the tribe’s Witch Doctor, a creature stumbled from the edge of the jungle , waved it’s spindly arms at us, and collapsed. Quickly we ran the other way. Once we reached the waterline of the warm Atlantic surf, the Witch Doctor turned and babbled at me in French. “Get the hell out of here now”, he ordered. I jumped into the water. A week later, after my skull was scalded and my eyes blind from salt, I was picked up by a Russian trawler whose crew reeked of opium residue and library paste. After a quick game of “Who’s The Putin?”, they told me a terrible tale of how using antibiotics had morphed an entire tribe of pygmies into a hideous, flesh eating chorus line of mutant brain suckers.

Now it’s happening here in my native land. A Super powered staph strain that kills people with nothing more invasive than a simple scratch on their hand or a digit prodding the depths of the inner nostril. It’s cause is simple. Once we began to chase down bacteria with our knowledge of medicine, the same bacteria began to push back. We get them, they get us. But neither of us ever wins. Except this time it may be different . This Frankenbug may be the one that that does the same thing to us as the one that got the pygmies. I pray to the Gods we survive this assault on our mortal souls and that our brains don’t get sucked out of our skulls like they did the time I was stranded for three weeks off the Ivory Coast.

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