All sorts of things can happen during Christmas time, good and bad. One of the most exciting things that happen at Christmas time is Santa Claus' visit. I don't need to explain to you that he arrives by reindeer-driven sleigh. What the general public either doesn't know or chooses to ignore is that direct contact with Santa's fleet of reindeer can be hazardous to one's health due to various bacteria and such.
Santa has plenty of direct contact with his reindeer. They even sleep in his bed with him (on a rotating schedule of course like sister wives). Santa has had all the proper vaccinations.
This year, when Santa and his bacteria-ridden power train arrived at Megan's house in the wee hours of the morning of December 25th, she was awake reading Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto for a class that she anticipated having one day. Being a compassionate individual with a love for all of God's creatures she was immediately drawn to the majestic beasts. She pulled herself from the couch and slipped on a pair of grayish suede oxfords that were near the front door. "I'll just peep at these reindeer real quick", she thought, "Santa doesn't need me in the mix while he's doing his gifting thing, anyway".
She quietly scooted out the front door just as Santa's bottom-half appeared in the mouth of her parents' fireplace, red-furry pants, shiny black Doc Martens and all.
The reindeer were patiently waiting for their captain on the roof. The desert topography of Cave Creek, AZ served as an unusual backdrop for these beasts of the North.
Megan was an accomplished child gymnast and cheerleader. She hoisted herself onto the tiled roof of her parents’ house, using the front bumper of her Oldsmobile as a stepping stool with ease and grace.
She stood for a moment staring at the reindeer, face to snout. Steam poured into the dry desert air from the breath of all the mammals on the roof, Megan included, like smokestacks in some since-abandoned Midwest manufacturing town.
She approached the lead reindeer (Rudolph, I guess). The animal was receptive to her touch. The rest of the reindeer gathered around her and she spent several minutes stroking and nuzzling the large animals, dividing her attentions among them, as one would with a litter of puppies. Soon Santa himself appeared on the roof somehow shimmying up the family's chimney like he'd do a million more times that night. When he saw Megan in her bathrobe and suede oxfords, cuddling his antlered fleet the way she was, he looked as if he had just been involved in a minor traffic accident. He knew that this type of close contact with reindeer for a person without current North Pole shots could be disastrous. Claus however was in a terrible hurry and had zero time to explain why human-reindeer contact was dangerous, what course of action to take now that she had been exposed or to exchange insurance information. "She looks like a healthy broad", Santa said to him, "I'm sure her immune system is right as rain". With no more than a nodding gesture in her direction he mounted his sleigh and with a masculine "Hi-yaaa" he was air-bound to the next household of naughty, nice and in-between children.
From all outward appearances Megan did seem strong. Lean and toned as her gymnastics pedigree would suggest. There was no way for Santa to know that internally Megan was prone to fragility and counted acute allergies to wheat and dairy among the ailments she faced daily. If there was a way to get sick it seemed little Megan would find it. She always kept a positive head about her and rarely let discomfort from sickness or less than perfect adherence to her strict wheat and dairy-free dietary regimen get her down.
By the time her family began to rise on Christmas morning, however, the reindeer flu had begun to show signs in Megan. Having to share a birthday with Jesus, Megan was a bonafide Christmas baby and it seemed doubly unjust that she would suffer the terrible fever and cold sweats that accompanied this particular strain of foreign flu on her birthday and Christmas.
Not one to spoil a party, Megan kept her symptoms to herself, which by now had begun to include stomach cramps and dizziness, while members of her extended family began to arrive for the holiday festivities. She even found the strength to assist her mother in preparing the Christmas turkey, which she had decided this year she would not roast in the traditional manner but rather splay open like a dissection frog in a 7th grade biology class, de-bone the leg meat, stuff the leg meat into the open cavity of bird with a mixture of wild rice and herbs and then tie the whole thing back together with twine in a poultry sculpture that resembled a giant spicy tuna roll. This recipe, which she had apparently adopted from a Martha Stewart cookbook, was laborious to execute and by the time Megan and her mother put the giant sushi roll of meat into the oven her skin was pale and it was becoming obvious to Megan's mother and the other revelers that something was terribly wrong with her health.
She came clean to her family, detailing to them her late night encounter with St. Nick and his famed reindeer. It was still unclear to her if her symptoms were Santa/reindeer related. It could have simply been her climbing and frolicking in the cold December night, sans proper wintertime outerwear, that had her at her current state. Either way, Megan decided, every particularity must be articulated if they were to plan the proper course of action against the illness, which had at this point shown itself through her skin in the hue of human green that seemed common only on the faces of sufferers of man's great plagues of antiquity.
It was with this same level of careful articulation that she recounted the previous night's encounter to the D.O. on duty at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, just a short trip up the 101 freeway from her family home in Cave Creek. Only after Megan's family had exchanged gifts and cards and consumed the enormous turkey roll that she, at her mother's increasingly voluminous insistence, had made the trip to E.R. She now found herself in triage, telling her tail to the tall doctor in charge. The doctor was a physically formidable man who had gone bald before his years, no doubt due to the stress of medical school and the horrors of sewing so many fingers back on to so many strangers' hands. He looked as though he wore Under Armor brand athletic wear and held membership at Gold's gym, a T.V. doctor in the modern tradition of Grey's Anatomy or House.
The doctor listened intently, clearly intrigued by the events leading to the onset of Megan's illness and eager to diagnose his patient.
"It really does sound like Reindeer flu”, the doctor marveled to Megan, "Of course we'll need to run a few tests to be sure". Blood was taken, urine was given and the clocked ticked-on toward midnight when it would no longer be Megan's birthday and it would no longer be Christmas, but she would surely still be in abdominal pain and light-headed.
When the tests from Megan's bodily fluids came back positive for Reindeer Flu the T.V. doctor seemed almost gleeful to report the results. You see, the doctor saw many patients weekly and while their conditions certainly varied from hypochondria to urgently life threatening, they generally fell into the same handful of diagnosis. Why had the doctor spent so many years with his nose in a book, all the while shedding head hair, if not to identify and treat truly rare conditions affecting his fellow man? Simply put, this sort of thing was exciting for him.
Reindeer Flu, at least in these parts, it turns out was exceedingly rare. Only five cases had been documented in the Phoenix area since they began keeping count in 1950 and only three of those cases were caused by Santa's reindeer. The other two Phoenicians inflicted with Reindeer Flu were mischievous school children who had ventured beyond fences to come in contact with reindeer who were kept in captivity in the city's zoo. The Phoenix Zoo has long since discontinued its reindeer exhibit and shipped out its inhabitants because of just these episodes.
"Don't worry", the doctor reassured Megan, "It's nothing we can't fix-up with the right antibiotics". This news was the best present she could have received. By this time the local press had caught wind of Megan's ordeal and began arriving at the Mayo Clinic in two's, one reporter and one camera operator per television station. It would be an interesting Christmas story, they supposed.
Megan was reluctant to speak with the press, not from shyness, but out of sheer exhaustion. It had been a very long day and not one that she counts among her best birthday/Christmases. With scripts for her medication in hand and her eyes sore from the bright fluorescent lights of the E.R. she pained to get home to sleep off this damned contamination and resume her life of no more holidays, as little wheat gluten and milk as possible and not a reindeer to speak of.
