Though it is now dying down, the swine flu epidemic that never quite was hit home for me two weeks ago. I was still up at BU, finishing my freshman year of college. It was crunch time though, with finals only days away and summer in my grasp. Swine Flu was all over the news. It was being labeled a "pandemic" by the World Health Organization. I discovered that for the spread of a disease to be officially called a pandemic it has to fulfill certain requirements. I just thought there was a guy over at the WHO looking through Roget's Thesaurus for the worst synonym of "bad". Anyway I paid it little mind. Swine Flu was in Mexico and a couple places around the U.S., (including a couple of kids on Lowell, MA). I had work to do.
And there I go, letting my guard down because hey, this stuff doesn't happen to anybody I know, let alone me. Unfortunately, fate had a little blessing in disguise prepared for me. Sunday. I'm feeling fine until about 4PM, at which time I start getting a bit of a headache. 10PM. I start feeling a little more body and back aches, my girlfriend's roommate has been feeling sick and I guess I could've caught something there but my symptoms are nothing I haven't fought off before with couple of ibuprofen tablets. Oh how wrong I was. Fast forward to midnight, I've got a fever for sure. The aches are worse and I'm freezing and sweating at the same time, wrapped up in sweatshirts and blankets. I decided I'd go to Student Health Services the next day and hope that I could get some antibiotics which would make me comfortable enough to study again and maybe even go back to my early-morning math tutor job to get one last paycheck before the summer.
The next morning I wake up with a sore throat, fever and aches again. I do some work, run some errands and around noon take my temperature. 100.4. Yeah, its a fever, but nothing too bad. I head off to a Physics review session and it is only after that, around 5PM, a day after my symptoms first show up, that I make it to Student Health. I get a text message from my girlfriend, her roommate was here earlier and had some sort of virus they gave her antibiotics for. No swine flu though. Great. At this point my sickness was interfering enough with my studies that the outlook for my back-to-back finals did not look good. Maybe... just maybe I could get sent home, doubt it though.
So my name is called, I get up and go into a nurses office. She goes through the motions, asks questions about symptoms, some tests, yadda yadda yadda. Then comes the temperature taking. I was up to 100.4 a couple hours ago so maybe I'd get up to 101 now. That would be on the high side of a low fever but then again, nothing to get sent home with. The beeping goes off. Oh boy, 102.3. I'm on fire! That was something I did not expect. With the whole swine flu craze scaring city-folk, the nurse states she wants to give me a flu test, something they even have a special room for. I go in and wait for the nurse ti come back. Soon enough she does, except she's all dressed in sterile gear: gloves, harinet, mouth cover, the works. They sure don't take any chances there. Now, keep in mind, I had no idea what a flu test entailed, but I quickly decided I did not like them when she said, "This will only be uncomfortable for about three seconds." Doctors are nothing new to me and I quite aware of their tendencies to understate the painful. (Remember when your pediatrician used to give you a shot: "This will only hurt a bit...") The nurse pulls out what seemed like a six-inch long sick with a cotton-y Q-tip head on one end and asked me to tilt my head back. She then proceeded to stick the end of it up into my nose further than I though was possible. I began to worry that she'd start to poke my brain! Just as the discomfort became unbearable, (a mix between gagging and sneezing), the nurse pulled it out and left the room probably to stick my snot in some expensive flu machine. And there I waited.
I pondered the possible outcomes of the test while I waited alone in the room and played games on my iPod. Maybe I'll just have that same dumb virus my girldriend's roommate has. That'd be a bummer. I lost quite a bit of study time. Or on the other end, maybe I legitimately have swine flu! Maybe I'll have to be whisked off to be quarantined in Beth Israel or Massachusetts General Hostpital! Oh God, I'd done everything you're not supposed to do when you might have a contagious illness today! I ate in the large dining hall, I took Boston's subway system, I'd sat in a lecture hall for two hours with a couple hundred students during phsrics review! I could be spreading swine flu to hundreds! I'd run through the scenarios once or twice in my head when the door opened. It was not the nurse who came in this time but another woman. She sat down in the chair and started speaking. "My name is Doctor..." That was all I needed to hear. Now, Boston University Student Health Services isn't a fancy hospital or clinic. As such, most of the workers are nurses with a few doctors on staff. When you see and actual M.D., you know theres trouble. She proceeded to tell me that although my flu test was negative, (there goes my fame), the high fever and body aches indicated that there was something messed up in my system. And as a student in the fourth-largest private university in the country and in the middle of the most densly populated city in New England, the BU administration had instricted Student Health to immeidiately isolate any students with flu-like symptoms. The term "isolation" came to mean that yes, I was being sent home, miss my final two exams and stay away from groups of people for at least a week.
I left Student Health with a skip in my step and jubilation in my heart. I could wait to retake my exams and reschedule them in a more convenient way, rather than a day apart as I would have taken them. Nevertheless, I soon relaized that they did not diagnose me with anything, nor did they give me any medication to counteract my aches or fever other than Tylenol. Lame. On my way back to the dorm to contact my parents and begin packing up, I called my girlfriend who at this point probably had a 50/50 chance of having already caught what I had. Needless to say, she was not happy when I started with, "You're not going to believe this...". In a quick response she said, "No, you do not have swine flu!" I told her I didn't, but that I would be going home ASAP, either that night or early the next morning. With that she became even unhappier as we had planned to hang out a little before she got on a flight back to her home in South Carolina on Saturday. We'd basically been inseperable for months and the fact that we had barely twelve hours or so to say goodbye didn't sit well with either of us. But, that was the way it would be. I said goodbyes to the guys on my floor, some of whom I'm rooming with next year and proceeded to pack that night and the next morning for my trip home.
My mom had to take a day off from her job as a middle school teacher to drive the two hours from Berlin, Connecticut to pick me up, all the while mentioning how ridiculous it was for me to be sent home during this swine flu scare when the test showed I didn't even have the flu. I definately had something though because for nearly a week and a half after I got home I was plagued with sore throats, coughing fits, and overall fatigue. It was at this point that I decided that it was possible I really did have swine flu. After all it was a different viral strain than regular influenza, (the test for which I was given), perhaps it doesn't show up as well in the tests? I may never know the truth. But what I do know is that it is Saturday night right now, my first re-take exam is on Tuesday and I'm shaping up to be just as prepared for it as I would have been the first time around. Funny how that happens.
Oh and remeber how I said BU is the fourth-largest private university in the country with 16,000 undergrads on campus? Well this article came out in the BU newsletter about a week after I got home.
"Flu numbers climb a bit, Fear lessens a lot"
Now, guess who the "one of the three students" in paragraph four is...
jura espresso machine
2 years ago
