What H1N1 Feels Like

By Christian Probasco, 10-30-09

	Caption: That's the one that got me

What am I going through? Coughing, fatigue, some nausea, achy joints, headaches and thirst. Not enough to keep me from work. In fact, I’m writing this having just completed laying out the ads for next week’s edition of the Sanpete Messenger.  However, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t rather be home in bed.

My three-year old son has it worse. He’s miserable and his temperature has fluctuated between 100 - 103. He is on his own fighting this thing off. No vaccine, no Tamiflu.

H1N1 hit Sanpete County like a tornado. Earlier this week we got a report at the newspaper that about a quarter of the students at Manti Elementary (I work in Manti) were home with the flu. Half the people in the nearby little burg of Sterling were down with it.

That night I got a call from a relative who pleaded with me to get my kid vaccinated.

“It’s just the flu,” I said, “No different than any other flu except it has a name.”

Not being one who pays attention to headlines proclaiming apocalypse, I hadn’t kept up much on the virus’s progress. Mea Culpa.  Now I figured, “here’s something (the vaccine) the government can do for us, for a change, instead of to us.” We checked the internet to see where we could get vaccinated. Turns out, that’s not an easy proposition in Utah.  You have to be at a clinic that carries the vaccine on the day it’s available. People who were more far-sighted than I have camped overnight in the cold to be close to the beginning of the line. That’s a difficult proposition for anybody who works.

I checked the Utah Dept. of Health’s website . Instead of giving you a schedule of where and when to get your shots, you have to play a guessing game, throwing in various locations and times and hoping you hit the jackpot. Every time I entered “Sanpete County” I was told, “There are no Clinics available within that County.”

In fact, there are many clinics within the county. Apparently the Dept. of Health just doesn’t want to deliver vaccine to us.

The very next morning I took my boy to our babysitter, who had a cough. That’s the most salient symptom of H1N1. My wife and I both have to work. Like most working people, we don’t have time for “preventative medicine,” in any of its forms, a fact I have never been able to communicate to any of my doctors. When I tell a doctor I work longer hours than him/her, I get ignorant replies like, “you’re going to have to stop working when you get full-blown diabetes/a kidney infection/a bladder infection, aren’t you?”

Oh yeah? You don’t think poverty or unemployment has any effect on one’s health?

In this case, preventative medicine would have meant keeping the boy home, which means that my wife or I would have had to miss work. I left him there.

Soon after my boy came down with the flu, I got it. This virus is a lot worse for children than adults, unless they’re very senior adults.

My wife appears to be completely immune to H1N1.

The health issue is being debated on Capitol Hill right now, of course. It would be nice if regular workers in the United States were allowed to be sick a few days out of the year without having to risk losing their jobs. But I don’t expect much from Washington D.C., or even Salt Lake City, which might even vaguely resemble what most working people around here would consider ‘help.’