Tuesday, September 29, 2009

You Swine!

I just read that 21,000 college students are sick with swine flu! Well, our family definitely contributed to the statistics.

We were visiting our daughter two weekends ago. She had gotten up really early to attend some fraternity events. It was the boys' Pledge Day. She met up with us at lunch and just kept telling us how tired she was. We all went our separate ways and we met up with her again at a fraternity tailgate just before the game. She was having fun and seemed great.

My husband and I had amazing seats on the upper deck. Unfortunately, we had to walk up about ten sets of ramps. By the time we got to the top, I was huffing and puffing. We found our seats and within minutes we were smack dab in the middle of A Bug's Life. Huge ones were dive bombing everyone. Medium ones were flying down my shirt. Crickets were flinging themselves at people. Tiny, buzzing ones flew in my ears. We had a screamer a few rows behind us, as the bugs were pelting her. Definitely annoying and yet highly entertaining. By the 3rd quarter of the game, I told my husband that if one more bug touched my body anywhere, I was done. I got up to start the treck down the ramps after some huge bug landed on my head.

We were at the bottom of the ramps, when I heard my cell phone ring. It was my our daugter, telling me through tears that she felt horrible. (She had texted me just before halftime to tell me she and her friends were leaving. She commented that it hurt to stand so long. I texted back, Oh, good grief! I was thinking what a lightweight she was.) She asked me to come to her house as soon as I could. She said that her legs hurt really bad and she had a terrible headache. I told her it sounded like the flu and to take some Motrin, get a cool drink, put a cool cloth on her head and get in bed. When the game was over and our friends met up with us, we walked to the car and they dropped me off. I walked in to find her laying on top of her comforter, not having done anything I had suggested. She said she just couldn't move. There were no clinics open that night so we had to wait until the next morning. We took her to the doctor who immediately said she had H1N1 (swine flu). They swabbed her throat and said that a study was being done and they would have the results in a week. No Tamiflu was given. He wrote a prescription for Naproxin (for the aches and fever) and for Musinex D.

I have since learned that the swab tests for influenza a and influenza b. If you test positive for influenza a, you have the swine flu. If you test positive for influenza b, you have the flu. The nurse called with results this past Saturday, and she did indeed test positive for influenza a.

So how was it? The initial aches and fever made her feel pretty bad. This child has never had any flu before. After the Motrin kicked in the first night, she actually didn't feel quite as bad. All in all, it was much less symptomatic and shorter lived than the flu. It hit her like a ton of bricks on Saturday and she was feeling pretty good by Tuesday, and had been fever free for a day and a half.

1 comment:

  1. Poor thing! This is a very helpful post though. I heard that if you have the swine flu, you should be better in 3-4 days. So glad there weren't any complications!

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