Fragile Life

When a person faces a disease that cannot be cured, their life may become very fragile. In the south of China, many people like to eat wild animals, for example, snakes, civet cats, and rabbits. It has been a custom for centuries. In 2003, tourists from other parts of China went to the south of China to eat the wild animals, and then they went back to their cities. However, at the same time, a disease came out in the south of China, and it spread far and wild all over China through the tourists who came to the south to eat wild animals. This disease made people get a fever and feel chest tightness. It was an infectious disease, and the medical experts called it “SARS”. When the SARS occurred in 2003, the only thing I could feel was terror.
The first terrible incident related to SARS was that my cousin’s father-in-law died a few days after he contracted the disease. During that time, many people only lived for a few days after they got infected. At the beginning period of SARS, there was no medicine for it. When the infected people went to hospitals, the doctors did not have methods to cure them. The patients felt hopeless, and so did the doctors. The disease spread so rapidly, the government of China asked a majority of medical experts to research this disease and find the methods to cure it. However, the medical experts did not know the real cause of the disease, so they could not find the ways to prevent it. Therefore, when my cousin’s father-in-law became ill, all of us felt terrible and knew he would pass away in few days.
In addition, I was afraid of the SARS virus, so I did not go out for dinner with my family or shopping with my friends. SARS was an infectious disease, and medical experts thought that people might infect each other, if they spent time together. Because SARS was a respiratory infection, people who got together to talk would get infected through respiratory tract. Therefore, there were few people in the restaurants and shopping malls. As we all knew, SARS had a highly infectious speed. If one person got SARS in a group, the others in the group would get the disease very fast. That really made me scared, and I felt I was far away from my social life at that particular time, which made me sad.

Finally, because of the terror of SARS, my mother disinfected my father and me three times a day. The medical experts asked people to disinfect each other because it could help prevent SARS. I had to go to school every day, so the first thing I did when I got home after school was disinfection. My mother would use the 84 disinfector to sterilize my shoes and clothes. The same thing also happened to my father. Every day all I tasted was the 84 disinfector, and the flavor drove me crazy. Another reason for the precaution was there were many viruses, so we had to sterilize. The bacterium of SARS was everywhere even if people might not have been conscious of it. My mother was anxious about the bacterium, so she disinfected as possible as she could. I could remember how hard she worked to sterilize me until now, and it also proved how terrible was the disease.

Now, many years have passed since the virus changed our lives, but I can still feel the terror of this disease. When people talk about this event, the expression on their faces was horror. I also recalled I was very afraid during that time. The SARS took away my relative’s life, made me feel scared, and forced my mother to look like a doctor. Then, I realized that human beings were really small when we faced some terrible things. In the face of the disease, we are powerless. Sometimes, we felt disappointed because we could do anything but to look at our relatives suffering the pain from the disease. How terrible this disease was! It was really an awful thing that would hopefully never happen again.