H1N1: The scoop on swine flu
It's official: we are panicking. As dismal line-ups of sweaty children and their desperate parents wind their way for blocks around public vaccination sites across North America, fuelled by rumours of dwindling supply and horror stories of otherwise healthy children dropping dead, our fear has reached pandemic proportions. But is this flu really something to be afraid of?
I can tell you, because I had H1N1 and I am only just now on the mend.
What's H1N1 really like?
Well, you know how when you get food poisoning and the entire time you are moaning on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor the single thought that possesses you is: it must have been that egg salad sandwich that looked like it had been sitting out for a while that you stupidly ate anyway? The night that I came down with H1N1, all I could think about was the party I attended for the closing of Toronto Fashion week a couple nights earlier, and the guy not 10 feet away from me who coughed extravagantly all over a tray of passing drinks.
I remember thinking to myself at the time, "That's really uncool, right now, to be spewing your germs around at a party." And then two nights later, there I was, clinging to my bed in a hallucinatory fever, like it was a life raft, and I was stranded somewhere out on the ocean in the middle of a raging storm.
Dry, scratchy throat
The first indication that all systems were not go came earlier that afternoon. I had just walked out of a difficult meeting (did that bring it on?) and noticed that every time I tried to swallow, there was a strange lump of something dry and scratchy, like a piece of beef jerky wedged at the base of my throat. This piece of meat was not dislodged in any way by a glass of wine before dinner, which tasted like salted cardboard. It wasn't long before I had thrown myself onto my mattress with my head bonging and my eyes about to explode.
That night, I tossed and turned as the bottom of my feet burned, my fingernails felt like they were being pulled from my cuticles and my hair follicles hurt. No quarter of my physical being was spared. Every single millimetre ached. And yet there was no real manifestation of any illness other than this hideous discomfort, and the sensation that the beef jerky in my throat had somehow slid deeper into my chest and bloomed into a sort of wet dishcloth dampening my attempts at drawing a breath.
