The Coronavirus Flu

Hello all.  Sorry for the long pause between nifty guest post and actual content. There was a lot going on, including but not limited to the thing that's being called the "novel coronavirus."  Novel means new, of course, but there's really nothing new about coronaviruses; they've been around forever.  The only thing new is that they can apparently jump the species barrier now, which is fine if you're a bat or a sloth or something and have been dealing with coronaviruses since the dawn of recorded time, but deucedly inconvenient if you're a human being.   And in between actual good ideas (quarantining people for 14 days, restricting the movement of possible infected persons), there are plenty of really bad ideas being deployed in the spread of this thing. 

Like quarantining people on a cruise ship, for example.  Bad idea.  The internal air system on a cruise ship is designed to move everything around, as opposed to an isolation ward in an actual hospital that sucks air from outside under a negative pressure containment system, so you have lots of people potentially infecting each other all over the ship.  (Check out the film "Outbreak" if you want to see how this works.)  Plus, they gave the crew members nothing by way of protective equipment, which meant they were getting exposed to this virus every time  they knocked on someone's cabin door.  Which they did a lot, apparently. 

So, okay, that was a bad idea.  Another bad idea:  Treating everybody Asian as though they might potentially have the coronavirus.  People, please check your big ugly xenophobia at the door on this one, okay?  Your Asian next-door neighbor who was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Detroit and has never left the country is a lot less  likely to have the coronavirus than your white across-the-street neighbor who just got back from a business trip in South Korea.  And the racist element of this thing gets even uglier when you consider that there's been an outbreak in Italy, and nowhere are people avoiding Italian restaurants or treating  white people with Roman noses like they have the plague.  And nobody's said anything about canceling all flights to Italy, though, she says with a reluctant sigh, it's probably on somebody's agenda.

Besides, it turns out that the coronavirus is actually not all that dangerous.  Oh, you don't want it, but your odds of dying of it really aren't that good. Most people who get it feel like they have a bad cold for a few days.  You can die of it, but most of the people who die of it are the people who typically die during an epidemic.  The very old, the very young, people with compromised immune systems.   How do they treat it? Rest, lots of fluids, cough syrup.  Since this thing is getting around (it's ridiculously easy to spread a virus anymore, and with this one it turns out you can be asymptomatic for possibly a couple of weeks before you get sick, which means you don't trip fever detectors in airports), we might want to all invest in an extra bottle or two of Robitussin. But that's it.  That's all I'm doing.  That and keeping an eye on the headlines. 

Speaking of dangerous viruses, Joan caught a cold a couple of weeks ago and stayed home from work.  I went to work as usual, and by the time I came home, Joan was feverish and having trouble breathing.  We called the nurse-on-call provided by her health insurance company.  She asked us a bunch of questions, and after getting our answers, told me to take Joan to urgent care, pronto.

So I packed her up and took her to urgent care. This was not easy, because she was in her jammies and didn't want to go out.  But, I talked her into a coat and some shoes and we headed for the only urgent care around that was open at 8:00 on a Friday night.  They poked and prodded and asked questions and took a chest X-ray.  When the chest X-ray came back, the nurse in charge told Joan they weren't equipped to handle her at urgent care and I'd need to take her to the ER. 

So off to the ER we went.  The ER was mobbed with people hacking and coughing and sneezing (really, is there any place better than an ER waiting room to get some horrible disease?).  But they took Joan back right away.  We got a little room in the corner someplace, and watched some Godawful sitcoms for about the next five hours.  This handsome young guy in a white coat came in a couple of times and made various pronouncements, the last of which was, "I'm going to admit you."  And at something like 2:30 in the morning, they wheeled her into a room on a long ward on the fourth floor.  I got to go home at that point, and deal with a massive craving for breakfast cereal. Why breakfast cereal? I have no idea, but I was hungry and that seemed like the food to get.  Maybe it's the human equivalent of cat kibble in that it requires no imagination whatsoever to prepare. 

So Joan was in the hospital for five days.  She got better. She got worse.  She got better.  She got worse.  Some specialist in infectious disease came in to see her.  Some Regular Doc came in to see her too. They told her at least three times that they were going to discharge her today before her fever suddenly spiked again and deep-sixed that idea. An occupational therapist took her for a walk.  (I'd have been jealous, but she said he didn't actually hold her hand.)

While all that was going on, I was going to work and going to the hospital and then going home very late at night.  Every time I went into her room, I had to put on one of those cute little masks like you see in coronavirus videos.  There was a little box of them attached to her door.  And get this.  When you looked up and down this long ward that she was on, every single door had a little box of masks attached to it.  I mean, it was Upper Respiratory Infection Central around there. 

The hospital finally sent Joan home after five days.  That's a long time to be in the hospital if you're not too sick to care.  She missed a week of work.  Recovery has been slow but steady.  And what caused all this havoc? The flu.  The common, ordinary, comes-around-every-winter flu.  So if you're worried about getting the coronavirus, GET YOUR FLU SHOT.   And if you're not worried about getting the coronavirus, GET YOUR FLU SHOT ANYWAY.  Any chance you have to avoid being in the hospital for a week is a good  chance to take. As it happened, Joan had her flu shot, but she got it anyway, which is just Bad Luck as far as the docs were concerned. But seriously. Get your flu shot.  Wash your hands a lot. Stay home if you don't feel well.  And don't get all panicky if somebody accidentally sneezes on you.  There's a statistically significant likelihood that you're going to be fine.