Some people know how to get with the times. Others? Not so much. Andy Serrano is a troglodyte of the latter variety. When we asked him why he was hacking up blood, he said it was antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. Umm what? It’s 2020 and if the reason you’re hacking up phlegm and shivering isn’t coronavirus, you might as well die because your ancient ass is already a fossil.
It’s like, read the room, man. Coronavirus is all the rage now and if you don’t have it, you don’t have shit. Besides, didn’t we cure tuberculosis, like, a hundred years ago? Talk about old-fashioned. And, not to be that guy, but something from that long ago probably has some serious racial undertones present. You should be mindful of that.
“My TB was treatable at first,” Serrano said, “but then I lost my job and my health insurance so I couldn’t finish my course of antibiotics. The most resistant strains managed to survive and reproduce, and now there’s nothing the doctors can do.”
Ugh. What a snooze.
If you want people to care about you, then you need to keep up with the trends. All Serrano had to do was get coronavirus. He could’ve been an infection influencer. Everyone would’ve paid attention to his plight and demanded that he be given treatment. Instead, he’s just another nobody with some has-been disease.
To be fair, Serrano and his vintage ailment do have one or two fans out there, such as public health policy analyst Amanda Fletcher. She told us that if rich countries like the United States focused more resources on perennial killers like tuberculosis or malaria, we’d save exponentially more lives across both the modern and developing worlds.
Malaria? Like, from mosquitoes? Yeah, hard pass.
There are only so many hours in the day to be worried about all the bullshit going on in the world. Trump takes up the vast majority of it and I don’t think this mole used to cover my entire shoulder, so if you want people to care about your debilitating illness at least try to catch one that’s in the zeitgeist.