Grocery stores and 7-11s are now sold out of bottled water in Vancouver, in response to the DON’T DRINK IT OR YOU’LL SURELY DIE water-boil advisory throughout the GVRD.
Just the regular kind of bottled water, mind you — not the sparkling. Which is why I had a bottle of Pellegrino and a bottle of Perrier in my bag at the bus stop this morning.
Then I got off the bus when I spotted some bottled water in a tiny market. GO! GO!
Now, at my desk at work (and yes, some of this will go home with me) I have a massive cornucopia of beverages: 3 L of Fiji, 500 mls of Evian, 750 mls of Pellegrino, 500 mls of Perrier (Lemony!) and one glass of orange juice (unrelated.)
I also have a cup of coffee. The lovely Erin, editor and knower-of-things, told me that the CBC said that water that goes through a coffee maker is safe. I — writer and believer of fearful things — stuck it in the microwave for an extra 1:30 just to make sure I killed anything that might be wriggling about in its oily depths.
No Starbucks or Tim Horton’s are serving coffee.
We are a city unhinged.
Which I find really hilarious — especially my response to the whole thing.
I ran a camp for years, and I’ve also been camping a number of times in the backwoods. I know what it is to have to boil water because of a “Beaver Fever” (don’t EVEN go there) advisory, or to have to deal with the rampant germiness and potential for outbreak that is a large group of children.
I’m no pansy.
And I know that boiling water kills whatever might make it not okay. I can acknowledge this intellectually, as well as scientifically.
That doesn’t mean that the idea of icky water doesn’t give me the heebeegeebees.
I’m a practical girl — but I’m also OCD.
It’s the little precautions that save us from the biggest problems. I will maintain that until I die.
And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
The first summer I was co-in-charge of the camp I used to direct, we had a massive outbreak of the Norwalk virus during a camp for grades 3-5. It started with one little girl who was sick on the boat coming up, who then shared a drink with her friend, who then touched someone else, and then… oy.
First night? Five sick kids. We quarantined them. We furrowed our brows. We really had no idea.
Second night? 30 sick kids and 20 sick staff.
And it snowballed from there.
We had a makeshift M.A.S.H station in a large building, where children lay moaning on mattresses with plastic bags next to them, waiting until we could arrange enough water taxis and contact enough parents to get everyone home. The sick staff lay under a makeshift tarp shelter outside, as we tried to keep the two groups from reinfecting one another — that, and big camp guys sound really scary when they barf.
But despite the fact that we…
- bleached everything in sight — over and over and over and over
- constantly changed and washed kids’ clothing and bedding
- had inspectors come in to make sure we were handling the outbreak correctly
- had nurses and doctors come in to chart and monitor and treat the situation
- shipped kids out as quickly as we could, to anxious-looking but grateful parents on a dock at Horseshoe Bay
… people still kept getting sick. A virus is a magical thing. You can do everything right… and still things just keep going wrong. So we had to call it a day.
We cancelled the camp after that one and evacuated the island to let the virus “die”, which always seemed kind of sad to me.
I imagined this poor little thing roaming about, looking for a warm, moist host, unaware — like that odd guy at my junior high who liked to make weird bodily noises and take eating dares — that no one wanted to hang out.
People actually continued to get sick after they went home (to families who locked them fearfully in basements with a cup of tea and some crackers), as the virus that had lay dormant in them for a couple of days popped up for a visit.
But I did not get sick.
Me, Meg Fowler, who gets sick if she LOOKS at a germ, who has the immune system of a 90 year-old woman wearing no clothing in a snowstorm, who spent more days in her childhood throwing up than playing foursquare.
How?
I was DETERMINED I WOULD NOT GO DOWN. And though I may be weak in body, I am strong in will.
I would spend all night caring for kids in the “war zone” — getting vomited on, hauling them to the bathrooms, cleaning them up, dealing with their hot little hands and foreheads and their heartbreaking need for someone mom-esque to hug them — and then do my regular job all day. I was mercilessly exposed, wholeheartedly exhausted, and freakishly unable to avoid the nightmare that was unfolding around me.
Not that I wanted to… those were my kids and my staff. I am nothing if not mightily burdened by the kind of maternal drive that can materialize apple pies and diapers out of thin air.
But really, I should have gotten sick.
Most of the other people in with the kids got sick, including our nurses. There were a few caretakers, like me, though, that managed to avoid the virus we came to call “The Monkey” (in honour of the deadly carrier in the movie, “Outbreak”.)
How?
We were freaks.
I had two bottles hanging off my cargo shorts 24-7 — one with a bleach solution, one with a hospital-grade disinfectant. My back pockets were shoved full of latex gloves. Every time I would help a kid out, I would disappear for twenty seconds, change my gloves, and rub my hands down with a mixture of both.
Anytime I could get away for a proper washing, I would lather up for five minutes or more. And I also had a tiny spray bottle of Lysol that I used to wipe down doorknobs and phones and my computer keyboard. Hourly.
Catherine — who ALSO did not get sick, because of similar precautions — didn’t eat the entire time, fearing that the virus would sit on a piece of chicken and then jump onto her face when she went to eat it.
I DID eat — wrapped foods. Chocolate, specifically. To keep me awake — I was eventually up for a total of almost 100 hours without sleeping or napping at all, by the end — and because it seemed safe.
Some people wore masks, but I couldn’t bring myself to wear one while helping a 50-pound child get to the bathroom because she was too weak to walk. I figured all those kids felt bad enough without me looking like I was scared of them.
That was my only “risky move.”
But since it was heart-related, and not head-related, I figure I got lucky.
As I said to a reporter who came to see us on the island before we evacuated fully — and to most of the parents who I met on the docks — “Honestly, I don’t know what more we could have done. Viruses are tricky things. But we just focused on making the kids okay.”
And in the end, they were.
According to the Coastal Health Authority, we were the ONLY organization that successfully killed an outbreak of the Norwalk Virus — without further recurrence — in the entire 2002 season.
I’d like to think my little bottles and germ mania helped… as well as all the other qualities that rose up in me in the midst of the crisis and gave me the capacity to handle whatever came my way, from an emergency hospital run to a father yelling at me on the phone about having to miss out on a day of golf to come pick up his sick child.
I can honestly say I don’t regret a single move I made as a leader that week.
Which is rare. My ability to fend off regrets is usually on par with my ability to fend off virii.
But I just trusted myself. And have been a little better at that, ever since.
So I’ll stick with my Fiji water and my boiling of coffee this weekend, even if people giggle at me. Turbid water is nothing like the Norwalk virus, but eh… who knows what might have drifted into it?
A bunch of dirt?
A chemical leak?
A cow?
At the end of the day, I gotta believe… Meg Fowler?
That girl knows how to stay alive.
No matter what.
That is EXACTLY how I’m built. Rock it.
