Informator uniwersytecki

Comfortably… alive!

When I was a child I had a fever. 
My hands felt just like two balloons. 
Now I got that feeling once again. 
I can’t explain, you would not understand. 
This is not how I am. 
I have become comfortably numb.      

PINK FLOYD      
COMFORTABLY NUMB 

Presumably, we all have stories similar to one described by Pink Floyd in ‘Comfortably numb’ which unravels “medically” realistic lyrics sung to a mesmerising dream-like tune. 

Many kids liked the time when they were sick. Sick for a couple of days with flu-like symptoms, for example. School was out of question, and all people around were just too gentle to believe it could be true! Obviously there were tricks to make it all more dramatic - rubbing the thermometer, eating solid pieces of raw potato, colouring the handkerchief with red paint. Of course till the moment mum would snap and eventually say-‘Are you kidding me? Get up, wash and pack your stuff and off you go-we knew then that our visa for ‘home stay’ was just cancelled.

There were kids, though who WERE ill and did experience pain, suffering and hopelessness. They would not pretend and their life was frequently all-defined by their illness – brain tumours, leukemias, scoliosis, failing heart, etc. And we – those more lucky ones, bottled up emotions observing their everyday fight, being on a wheelchair or speaking in class with pronounced difficulty.

And now this - Covid pandemic! In a queue for vaccination you hear all kind of stories. Stories after which you get scared stiff and truly sorry for friends who after Covid attack got to hospital and barely survived, got alienated and completely confused after the battle with most cunny enemy, stories about those who died and did not manage to say a proper ‘good-bye’ and those whose last words to be heard were the ones of a paramedic “please- be calm and relax, you’ll beat it”. The last moments awaiting death solitarily without family, with this heart-breaking presumption of passing away just like that.

No one could have thought about such pandemics in years, frequently ridiculed in the catastrophic movies, revealing possible scenarios, one of which ACTUALLY came true. 

Human infectious disease outbreaks have been marked by Ebola, bird flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Rift Valley fever, sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), West Nile virus and Zika virus – probably the common element of all of them was they crossed from animals to humans. “The presence of a large reservoir of Sars-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals like pangolins in southern China, was a time bomb that finally exploded”- could it have been the possible scenario?

The Pfizer–BioNTech COVID19 vaccine (INN: tozinameran), sold under the brand name Comirnaty, is a COVID-19 vaccine developed by BioNTech in cooperation with Pfizer. It is both the first COVID-19 vaccine to be and the fact that we got it is still amazing. Not to be forgotten not to be underestimated. We got vaccinated – and we are alive. Thank you, Country. Thank you the World!!! Thank you, God!!!We are "comfortably alive".

Piotr Flieger
Department of Foreign Languages
photos: pixabay.com 

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Check Piotr's previous articles:
The Edge of Life
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