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Thu. Dec 11, 2003

The Martian Death Flu

The Martian Death Flu – It’s a bit like being stalked. You hear all the ”chatter” on the news about how bad it is. You see the chart of how many people have it, this early in the flu season. Vaccines? Forget about it, it was for the wrong strain, and they’re gone anyway. Then last week on Wednesday night, I started feeling … weird. Slightly feverish. Susan, out of the blue, announces ”you look grey.” I thought, here we go. But the next morning I felt … not weird.

On Friday, Susan gashed her finger at work bad enough that her boss insisted she go have it checked. At the minor emergency clinic, the guy who first checked her out determined it probably didn’t need stitches, an opinion encouraged by a full waiting room and the four hour wait it might take to see a doctor. Then he said, ”You see all those grey looking people out there, coughing and hacking? Most of them have the flu. If I were you, I’d hold my nose, and run…”

She didn’t run quite fast enough.

Monday night (about 72 hours later) she mentioned having a scratchy throat. Tuesday morning, about 10am, she stumbles back in the door after about an hour at work, looking like barely walking death. Sudden onset, aches, coughing, fatigue, loss of appetite … yep, Martian Death Flu. So at about the time Bobby Brown was slappin’ up on his wife, I was warming up chicken noodle soup for mine. She’s been alternately hacking or horizontal ever since, but her fever broke and, though still fatigued and coughing, she now seems to be past the worst of it.

So I started doing the math, being a numbers kind-of-guy. If she was symptomatic Monday night, theoretically, if I make it through Thursday night without symptoms, I’ll probably be OK.

This afternoon, I developed a scratchy throat.

Damn Martians.