On October 3 I went to Cañuelas, Pcia de
Buenos Aires to watch my grand nephew Jorge O’Reilly play polo. I did not
notice any sick polo ponies. They were all very beautiful and close-up they
were indeed small ponies. I asked Jorge’s father, Georgito why a bunch of polo
mallets in Jorge’s dressing room had numbers like 32 and 31. He told me that mallets
had to be made to accommodate the different heights of polo ponies.
When I returned to Canada on
October 12 I was beginning to cough incessantly. After spending a terrible
October 14 (Thanksgiving holiday) in bed I saw my doctor who prescribed antibiotics
to fight what he said was pneumonia.
I did not have the heart to inform him that
in Argentina
there have been a few isolated cases of humans getting Equine Influenza HRN8 in
a mutation called Equidaegrippe H7N7 and that in fact I did not have pneumonia
but the rarer polo pony grippe.
While I am still alive and recovering I
would have been almost happy to succumb to this so classy a disease that only
the right people in the right social circles might contract