Swine Flu Pt. 2

This might be a little strange post. You might find it self-centered or too dramatic, or just stupid, but after all, this is kind of my very own personal journal, so I'll write this non-objective stuff down just the way that I experienced things....
Means: Everything as usual.

I'm at university. Studying for the JLPT without any result. Still. I study. I guess there's a result after all, I just don't see it yet. My vocabulary has definitely improved. I studied at least 1000 words I did not properly know before. (Some of them I had forgotten, some were really completely new.) While I'm studying, I grab my neck. I guess it's sort of a habit. But I still have the leftover knobble called Ingo. (Actually it's Ingo II.) He's gotten smaller, compared to the huge plum thing I had during the summer. But he's still about the size of a walnut and I still don't wear ponytails that would expose my neck, for he's still clearly visible.
So, I was just sitting there, touching Ingo, and I came to remember how my octobre this year was filled with visits at several doctors.

Of course, in my family it can't stay secret if you're sick. And of course, all my grandmothers were informed in due time that I was sick (though they only knew I was sick, not that it was NOT a cold....which may be just due to the reason that no one but my brother knew why exactly I had been to the doctor), so they assumed the rest.....
And everyone in my family said the same: "Oh, I hope you don't have the swine flu!" or later "Oh, thank god you didn't have the swine flu, I was so scared you might have brought it."

Ha. Whenever they said that I just thought to myself "You guys would have been glad if it was just the swine flu if you knew what I was really tested for..."

After all, Ingo had not only been huge, much bigger than some years ago, but he stayed with me for several months, and he even got company on other parts of my body.

I never told my grandmothers why I had really been to the doctors, and if I was forced to tell them, I would just say it was something with the lymph knots. They would probably make nothing out of it. The better for me. But I'll never forget how the internist looked at my neck in disbelief, then touched the gigantic swollen lymph knot, and started to literally run for her nurses to make sure that my blood test had to be taken to the labs today and not tomorrow, and that they'd better make the courier wait for this was urgent. I must admit that it made me a bit uneasy to suddenly see the very earnest faces of the doctor and the nurses who had been all relaxed and smiling a moment ago, for I myself thought the chances of this really being something serious were small, so why did they freak out like this?

Well, in the end, after several visits to several doctors and several checks, I was only blessed with a pretty heavy form of mono (and as Ingo is still there, it might never leave me again...). Nevertheless, whenever some grandmother mentions how I had been sick when I came home from Japan, and that they are soooo glad it was not the swine flu, I just feel like saying "Yeah, thank god my symptoms weren't swine flu, but leukemia."

Naaah, I wouldn't tell them. Don't want them to die of a heart attack before I'll be able to add "Turned out it wasn't."

Ha. I daresay despite the media's information there are things far worse than the swine flu.