Thanks all!  Just need to pass one last post-treatment blood test before I break out the party hats and streamers.  That comes next month.

Brilliant!  Congrats to you Carl on the UND...we should have a Hep C Short Story section for all you creative writers!  

Keep swatting that fly...Jill xx

Nice work Carl, keep on doing what you do...

Carl, what a Bard!.... that is a very very good allegory. Do you write for a living?     Thanks for your words, I ditto Michaele!....Iris

Sheer poetry............. Michaele

A fly lighted on my table just as I sat down a decade ago.  Quite alarmed, I jumped up and called the exterminator.  Over he came and tented my entire house; pumped it full of poison.  "It needs to stay for a year!" he said.  All through those long months the fly looked dead.  The exterminator felt we had a fair shot at success.  I lived in the backyard in a small trailer.  Life was less than it was.  But I soldiered through it for the greater good of my mankind.

Six months after the tent came down the fly woke up.  We had failed to kill him.  The exterminator said there was nothing else to do, unless I wanted to try again.  

Or I could just wait for a better one. 

Ten long years that fly buzzed around my head.  A near constant distraction.  Sometimes I'd forget about him and get on with life.  But never for very long. 

Recently I read about a revolutionary new tent.  "Twice as effective!" they said.  Again they covered my house and filled it with a molecular ****tail of pure fly misery.  More toxic and targeted than anything before.  Again I move into the backyard; this time it was just a doghouse.  Soon enough life was but a whimper.

I'm eight months in.  They say the fly is undetectable.   I hope theyre right this time.  Because at night I scratch like a dog, howl at the moon and dream of flyswatters.