Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Little Things Get You

2) Infections

Imagine that you wake up one day to see what you think is a wart. It’s no big deal; you’ve had one or two of them before. You try to treat it. It seems like it’s working, but you’re not sure. The package on the OTC medicine says it takes upwards of a couple of weeks, so, again, no big deal.

Then, a couple of days later, another one pops up. Okay, you treat it like the first one (Which hasn’t gone away yet), and you know that you’ve got to wait for things to kick in. That it’s not going to disappear overnight.

A few more days pass, you think the first one is going away, so you focus on the other ones (A few more popped up over the week, but this sort of thing happened last time, it’s no big deal).  After looking up warts, and seeing they’re contagious to yourself (I.e., If a wart on your hand touches your other hand, another wart may show up there), you have to make a conscious effort not to scratch anything, especially your nose or eyes.

Another day passes, nothing’s changed–well, actually, something has changed: After unconsciously brushing the back of one of your arms on your couch, you discover you have a couple of small blisters on it. You decide it’s better to leave them be and not irritate them more. That proves to be a good idea, but it’s too late because, by the end of the next day, one of the blisters has ballooned to the size of the end of your thumb. By the next day, it’s turned a dark red color. In short order, the blisters hurt just from them stretching your skin.

Before you know it, more blisters emerge, not even in places you scratched or brushed up against, just popping up wherever they damn well, please. It’s just getting worse, with no end in sight.

Now, imagine that there are no medical professionals to tell you what’s wrong, no antibiotics, no other medicine, nothing to help you. How long do you think you could last like this? How well do you think you could fight zombies with thumb-sized blisters popping up all over your body? A few weeks? A few months? How long before this spread to other parts of your body? I’m not talking about your legs, but into your ears, or your eyes, or your bloodstream? How long would you last after that?

The worst thing is that infection could have started from something as simple as a weed brushing against your hands. That’s all it might take for your body to go haywire and for things to get completely out of hand, which, in a zombie apocalypse, could easily become a death sentence.

As difficult as it may be, you’ve got to try to keep yourself relatively clean, especially your hands. You need to really pay attention to what you touch, or else you may not realize that the nail that scraped your arm was rusty or the plant that brushed against your hand was poisonous. Just that small window of time left untreated can be the open invitation to something very dangerous.