So the flu is reaching its apogee here in lovely (crowded, dirty) Arizona. I’ve been trying to avoid touching things or people, and carrying wet countertop-sanitizing wipes around. The latter, I figure, will be a little more fierce than the sweetly perfumed things you buy to wipe your hands and your grocery cart with.
As yet I haven’t caught it, but my son emailed to say he’s sick. Hopes it’s not the flu…but of course it’ll be a day or so before he can tell.
Every year I get a flu shot. It doesn’t always work — I still get the flu about once every four or five years. And it’s time. A-n-n-n-d…when I do get the flu, it makes me magnificently sick. Most people get over it in a couple of weeks. For me, it hangs on at least four to six weeks. Often much longer. Whatever I picked up last March didn’t go away completely till around the end of October: eight months.
So as you can imagine, I’m not looking forward to the double-whammy version that’s going around this year. The shot is said to be about 32% effective at blocking an infection…which doesn’t sound a whole lot better than nil to me. It means you have about a 70% chance of contracting an infection once you’re exposed. And sure, it’s ducky that the shot supposedly attenuates the infection’s severity if you do catch it. That would mean, presumably, that if I hadn’t taken last year’s flu shot the bug that took six or eight months to clear up would have killed me dead.
SDXB invariably used to catch the flu or at least a heavy cold a few days before Christmas. Every year. Never failed. Well naturally, I didn’t want to pick it up from him every holiday. Coincidentally, the Great Desert University started offering free flu shots to employees about the time I moved in with him. So that was when I started lining up every year to get a jab. After that, I got sick a lot less often.
But…once in a while is once in a while too often. 🙄
One thing I simply can not understand is what on earth goes through the minds of people who insist on going out and about when they’re effin’ blue-in-the-face sick. WHY would you go to the office or to a gathering of friends when you KNOW just breathing on them, to say nothing of coughing and speaking (the latter spreads flu contagion nicely) and touching their hands or handing them a cup of coffee is likely to make them sick?
It might be kind of faintly understandable that you wouldn’t give a damn about strangers. Who cares if you make some fellow passenger on an airplane sick, when it’s going to cost you an arm and a leg to reschedule a flight? Sh!t-headed, but…people being people, it at least is comprehensible. But deliberately exposing your friends? That is incomprehensible.
Maybe people are just too stupid to understand that the flu is not a benign disease. Maybe just because they get over it in two or three weeks, they can’t even conceive that someone else might take six, eight, ten, twelve weeks to get over it. Maybe they really are so ignorant that they don’t know people can die of this disease.
My uncle died of the flu. He was a young and healthy man when he got caught up in the 1918 epidemic.
He left his young wife with a baby. My cousin couldn’t have been more than a year old when his father died. The widow spent the rest of her life working (in an era when women didn’t work) to support her son and later, her mother.
Please.
Do you have the flu?
Do you even think you have the flu?
STAY HOME, DAMN IT!
Have a little fekkin’ consideration.
I’ve only had the flu once when I was around 20 and it knocked me on my @ss. I was in bed for a week and it took me 4 weeks to recover. I began getting flu shots a few years ago because my doctor recommended them. I’m keeping my fingers and toes crossed that I don’t get it at my age because I can’t tolerate the loss of income. Also, it just might put me in the hospital. It scares me just to think about it.