ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A rugby stalwart from our town’s Heights district reckons this cough going around mustn’t be that bad because the lady on the government ad about the dangers out it looks about as puffed as he is by the first break in play.
Speaking candidly to this masthead this morning at the Betoota Heights Bumble Bees clubhouse, Tony Carter said he knows that lady’s pain.
“Oh mate,” he said.
“That lady on that bloody ad for the Sydney Sneeze and how it’ll get ya, I’ve been there before. Sucking in the big ones after a few too many work drinks on a Friday night. Few cheeky darts, too. Tell you what, it’ll fucken get ya. The grog and the nicotine, that is,”
“Tell you the truth, but joog, it gives me chills. Chills it gives me, boorie. Seeing someone suckin in the big ones is gross but fuck it sucks when you’re up like eight or nine phases of play and you’re crying out for some dopey centre to drop the fucken ball or something or boot the pill into touch on the full so you don’t have to run up the field any further. But yeah, if that’s as bad as it gets then yawn. They reckon too if it gets worse they knock you out and a machine breathes for you. Fuck me, I could do with a fortnight off work where I don’t even have to worry about breathing. Make the doctor’s work for their BMWs for a change.”
But Tony’s sentiments were not echoed by the Queensland Health authorities, who explained that the ad should be taken more seriously.
Professor Nathan Cook from the Scared Heart Simpson Desert Health Centre explained that if someone like Tony, who has a BMI in excess of 36, were to catch the southern cough then he’d probably be in hospital, too.
“I think young healthy men like Tony need to wake up to themselves,” he said.
“They need to remove themselves from the centre of their decision making. They might not get sick from the Pangolin’s Revenge but they might pass it onto someone who’d be fucken rolled in two days by it,”
“You know what I mean? It’s not about you, it’s about the people around you. How fucking hard is it to understand.”
More to come.
