Bring out your dead, bring out your dead...

So, the plague hit my office this week, in the form of a particularly deadly twenty-four hour stomach bug that swept through our open plan work environment like a tornado leaving a swath of destruction in its wake. Through this experience, I learned two valuable lessons: (1) I am never eating communal food again; and (2) my worst fear of Dying In The Shower While Living Alone is way less far-fetched than I had previously imagined.

As to the first point, we have narrowed down the entire outbreak to a single source - Patient X, our index patient - and to a single event, that most hallowed of holiday experiences to be had in New Zealand - the sharing of hot cross buns around Easter. Yes, I have been undone by a hot cross bun. That'll teach me to love God.

But it wasn't even the bun! Oh no, that would be too predictable and easy to avoid. Apparently, I was infected merely by using a knife after Patient X. Yep, it's not like I did something grody like swipe a half-eaten bun off of someone else's plate (ew) or, you know, lick a co-worker or something. I caught the plague from a knife handle. Evidently, kids have deadly germs that they give to their parents. This is why people with kids should have warning labels before you have to interact with them.

As to the second point, well without going into the gory details, lets just say there was a dizzy spell and an almost fall that threatened to leave me unconscious and probably dead on the floor of my shower with the water running. Which is the single worst thing about living alone - that fear that I will meet some unlikely and untimely end in my apartment and nobody will find me for five days because I don't even have a cat anymore to signal the neighbours, who probably could not even pick me out of a lineup anyway. Actually, this is a persistent fear unrelated to the shower that comes back to me regularly as I am going about any one of a number of slightly stupid and definitely not recommended household maintenance exercises.

For instance, the other day I was standing in my bathroom on a dining room chair wearing pink pajamas, leopard print platform heels and a camping headlight in attempt to fix a light fixture that is way too high for me with a pair of scissors. And the thought occurred to me that, if I fall right now and bean myself, the poor EMT guys will not know what the in the HELL is going on with this crazy old lady that lives alone. And God forbid it is not the EMT guys who find me. I can just imagine my manager trying to explain this scenario.

"She always seemed so normal at work. But clearly there was a side to her we could never have known. We've made an executive decision not to hire any more Americans in the future."

So, take that particular nightmare - being discovered dead in the aftermath of doing something ill advised in your house that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time - and now imagine you're naked and wrinkled and five days less than alive. And the person who signs your paychecks is the one to make this grisly discovery, the mental image of which will be his last and only enduring memory of you.

There. Now my nightmare is your nightmare. You're welcome.