Gracie’s got swine flu!
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Son of a gun.
I never get to be trendy. So even though I’d been reading the same stories that everyone else has the past few months, when I got a sore throat on Tuesday, I thought I’d just been singing too much. And when I got muscle aches and felt hot on Wednesday, I still thought it was nothing. It wasn’t until I felt much hotter, much more achy and downright gross on Thursday that I decided I should go to the clinic, just to rule out H1N1.Would’ve been a good plan, but it didn’t work out that way.
The clinic here in town got us in right away, and when the nurse was going through the usual check-in routine, she stopped being chatty when she took my temperature. She said, sort of to herself, “Well, look at that.” (I could see on the display that it was 101-point-something. Which doesn’t seem that high to me. Still…) And then she said, in a voice that sounded matter-of-fact (though it was pretty obvious she was making it sound matter-of-fact), “I’m going to ask you to wear this.” And gave me a face mask.
So THAT was interesting. The other interesting thing was that when she asked if she could do a nasal swab, she asked Greg and not me. I don’t think she was doing it to be rude. I think she just got serious all of the sudden and sort of forgot that the patient was still capable of making simple decisions. So she did the nasal swab (ow!) and left. When she had a follow-up question, she just put her head in the door to ask it. We didn’t see that nurse again.
The doctor came in a minute later and went over the symptoms with me. Then he looked in my mouth (I didn’t know they still did that), and listened to my breathing a lot. I don’t know what the respiratory thing is that they’re listening for, but I guess he heard it, because he said, “Yep, there it is.” (What’s with medical people talking to themselves? Shouldn’t they tell them in doctor school not to do that stuff?)
And then he straightened up, flipped my file closed and said — and I’m not kidding here — “Well, you’ve-got-swine-flu-Good-luck.” Good luck? Can’t believe they learned that one at Johns Hopkins either. But neither Greg nor I would’ve had time to register any response. The door was closing behind him AS he was saying it.
So Greg and I had a minute alone to digest that information. And maybe because we’re still relatively young, healthy and naive, we weren’t particularly scared. Just surprised. Who’d a thought it?
We were still working on that one when the next nurse came in. She gave instructions about what stuff to take (all over-the-counter, by the way), and she talked a little bit too fast and too bug-eyed. They prescribed Tami-flu for Greg, because as a diabetic, he’s at risk as well. She advised us that if Greg could sleep somewhere else in the house, he should. (Not an option. Oh well.)
And that was it. But just in case I hadn’t felt quite enough like Typhoid Mary, they didn’t let us go back up to the front desk and out the usual entrance. We were taken out the side door so that I wouldn’t inflict my plague-y self — through the face mask? — on all the normal people.
Well! I tell you, it gives you something to think about. Just like that, Greg and I are both unofficially quarantined, though it sounds like it’ll only be for a couple days. And I’m one of the pandemic stats. It’s just weird, really. Greg and I had to joke about the leper-colony treatment, but of course, we don’t blame them. In my case, it’s just going to be an inconvenience, but it’s a lot more than that to a lot of people. You just sort of think that if you’re going to come down with the It Disease of ’09, there will be some dramatic difference to usher it in. An orange sky. Recurring dreams about two-headed snakes. Something like that.
So … how do I feel? Well, all kidding aside, there’s no doubt this is a pretty kick-butt flu. Probably not the worst I’ve ever had, but in the top five. I’ve got work I’ve got to do today, and since we work from home, I can’t call in sick. I wanted to get the story down while it was still fresh, but other than that, I’m counting the minutes until I can lie down again. I’m tired of coughing. I’m fond of my tea right now — even more than usual. And even without the strangeness of being quarantined, life has that oddly rubbery, surreal quality that it gets when you’re sick enough to be out of it.
I’m sure there are going to be many, many stories to come out of the pandemic before it’s over. But there’s one everyday one, anyway.
Gotta go answer the teakettle now.
Related posts:
- Chicken Little says: The flu is coming! The flu is coming! (cough, cough)
- The running girl across the street
- Harry Potter and the Splintery Broomstick
- Cold as a bat’s underpants
- Broken voicebox, broken head
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7 Responses and Counting...
Get well soon! I’ve missed your posts.
Prayers. I hope you feel better soon and that it is a mild case.
“Good Luck” oh my!
My wife and daughter had it. So far I’ve avoided it even though I slept in the same bed with the wifey (king size, so we got a little distance…) Yep, good luck with that.
Gotta say, while I’m worried for you and Greg, the most disturbing part of the thing is the attitude of the staff. Have they not been inoculated? Shame on them! If they have, their back-unclean-monster position is indefensible. If they haven’t, they have no business working in a health care setting!
Sorry. This kind of thing gets my back up. Where are we to go for compassionate health care when the care givers are too scared for their own skins to give it?
I hadn’t thought of it that way. I was assuming that their thinking — maybe even their standing instructions — are something like, “I have to turn around and deal with a lot of people who are high up in the at-risk category — very elderly, babies, pregnant women, compromised immune systems, etc. etc. This person [meaning me] isn’t in that much danger, and I [the medical person] am not in that much danger, but if I spread these germs to my patients, some people could die.”
Just my thought. Any nurses or med-folk out there who know, please weigh in.
FWIW, this was not my usual doctor. I told Greg going in that I had gone to this guy once before, and he seemed like one of those doctors that walks the thin line between busy/abrupt and just plain rude.
s-p:
Well, there’s hope, right? In our case, Greg doesn’t appear to have caught it.
Probably the reason they were checking your lungs so closely is that one of the peculiarities of H1N1 is that it goes deep in to the lungs and develops pneumonia.
Hope you’re feeling better quite soon and Greg misses all the fun.