No, I didn't suffer from the plage and I didn't have to include Charles Borromeo in my prayers (today's antibiotics are working pretty well), but lying some days in bed with fever, bad dreams and cold feet makes you think in your few bright moments.

Most likely, I got infected by a colleague at work. At least that's the assumption of my doctor, who told me about children diseases and their sometimes unusual characteristics on the adult body. Perhaps a Streptococcus infection. Great. I can't remember being beaten with an infection like that for ages!

When colleagues and friends are talking about their kids, this sometimes turns out into a medical seminar: there are always nasty infection waves, making kindergartens and schools a sort of pest holes, where various germs are constantly exchanged. The last wave hit me.

Our beloved government wants and urges everybody to have a job and to have as much children as possible. If both parents are at work and no granny's available, they just have to put their sick kid into kindergarten / school, together with other sick children nobody has time to care for. Because in today's Germany everybody is in fear of losing his job, many people are going to work, though, and spread their children's diseases. This doesn't work out. If a kid is permanently ill and gets a daily refreshment with viruses and bacteria without any chance to recover, I wonder what's going wrong here. And I don't blame the parents for this!