Say, did you ever spar a few hot rounds with a real attack of grip?
When it comes right down to a case of being a Bad Boy the grip has
every other disease slapped to a sit-down.
I had the grip some weeks ago and ever since my system has felt
like eight cents worth of cheese.
The medicine sharps tell us that the grip is caused by a little
germ which emigrated to this country originally from Russia.
If that's the case I'm glad the Japs put the boots to the Czar. I
wish they would go after him again and kick his crown off.
I'll bet even money that the father of the first grip germ must
have been a bombshell and his mother was some relation to one of
Kuropatkin's retreats.
It's dollars to pretzels that the grip germ is the busiest idea
that was ever chased by a doctor.
Nobody knows just how or when the grip germs break into the system,
but once they get a foothold in the epiglottis nothing can remove
them except inward applications of dynamite.
The grip germ hates the idea of race suicide.
From one small germ there will arise and go forth a family the size
of which was never dreamed of in the philosophy of our wise and
busy President.
I don't know just exactly how they happened to warm wise to me, but
a newly married couple of grip germs took a notion to build a nest
somewhere on the outskirts of my solar plexus, and two hours later
they had about 233 children attending the public school in my
medusa oblongata; and every time school would let out for recess I
would go up in the air and hit the ceiling with my top-knot.
Before the next morning came all these grip children had graduated
from school and after tearing down the school-house the whole bunch
had married and had large families of their own, and all hands were
out paddling their canoes on my alimentary canal.
By nine o'clock that morning there must have been eighty-five
million grip germs armed with self-loading revolvers all trying to
shoot their initials over the walls of my interior department.
It was fierce!
When the doctor arrived on the scene I was carrying enough
concealed weapons to exterminate the entire Japanese army.
I'm up to one thing and that is that the Russians couldn't beat the
Japs because all the national energy and vitality emigrated from
St. Petersburg and came over here with the first grip germs.
If the Czar of all the Russians had been a wise Little Father he
would have encouraged the grip germs to remain loyal to their
native land and then he could have sent them out to Manchuria to
bite the ramparts out of General Oyama instead of chasing
inoffensive American citizens into the drug stores.
"Well, anyway the medicine mixer blew in, threw his saws behind the
sofa, put his dip net on the mantlepiece, and took a fall out of my
pulse.
"Ah!" he said, after he had noted that my tongue looked like a
currycomb.
"The same to you, Doc," I said.
"Ah!" he said, looking hard at the wall.
"Say, Doc!" I whispered; "there's no use to cut off my leg because
the germs will hide in my elbow."
"Do you feel shooting pains in the cerebellum near the apex of the
cosmopolitan?" inquired the doctor.
"Surest thing you know," I said.
"Have you a buzzing in the ears, and a confused sound like distant
laughter in the panatella?" he asked.
"It's a cinch, Doc," I said.
"Do you feel a roaring in the cornucopia with a tickling sensation
in the diaphragm?" he asked.
"Right again," I whispered.
"Do the joints feel sore and pinched like a pool-room?" he said.
"Right!"
"Does your tongue feel rare and high-priced like a porterhouse
steak at a summer resort?"
"It do!"
"Do you feel a spasmodic fluttering in the concertina?"
"Yes!"
"Have you a sort of nervous hesitation in your hunger and does
everything you eat taste like an impossible sandwich?"
"Keno!"
"Does your nerve centre tinkle-tinkle like a breakfast bell?"
"Right again!"
"Have you a feeling that the germs have attacked your Adam's apple
and that there won't be any core?"
"Yes!"
"When you look at the wall paper does your brain do a sort of
loop-the-loop and cause you to meld 100 aces or double pinochle?"
"Yes, and 80 kings, too!"
"Do you feel a slight palpitation of the membrane of the Colorado
madura and is there a confused murmur in your brain like the sound
of a hard working gas meter?"
"You've got me sized good and plenty, Doc!"
"Do you have insomnia, nightmare, loss of appetite, chills and
fever and concealed respiration in the carolina perfecto?"
"That's the idea, Doc."
"When you lie on your right side do you have an impulse to turn
over on your left side, and when you turn over on your left side do
you feel an impulse to jump out of bed and throw stones at a
policeman?"
"There isn't anything you can mention, Doc, that I haven't got!"
"Ah!" said the doctor; "then that settles it."
"Tell me the truth, Doctor!" I groaned; "what is it, bubonic
plague?"
"You have something worse--you have the grip," he whispered gently.
"You see I tried hard to mention some symptom which you didn't
have, but you had them all, and the grip is the only disease in the
world which makes a specialty of having every symptom known to
medical jurisprudence."
Then the doctor got busy with the pencil gag and left me enough
prescriptions to keep the druggist in pocket money throughout the
summer.
[Illustration: Enough prescriptions to keep the druggist in pocket
money throughout the summer.]
Later my wife came in and asked me how I felt, and when I began to
discourse amiably about undertakers she put up a howl that brought
the rest of the family around the bedside on a hurry call.
When I told them I had the grip each and every member of the
household from Uncle Peter down to the cook began to suggest
remedies, and if I had taken half they suggested they could have
sold me to a junk dealer and got good money.
That evening our next door neighbor, Bud Taylor, came in and
advised me to take quinine and whiskey every time I felt a shooting
pain.
I took his advice, but at the end of the first hour the score was
98 to 37 in favor of the shooting pains, and the whiskey had such
an effect on the quinine that it made the germs jealous, so between
them they cooked up a little black man who advised me to chase Bud
out of the house, which I did by throwing medicine bottles at him.
That night the whiskey and quinine held a director's meeting with
the germs and then they wound up with a sort of Mardi Gras parade
through my system.