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OPINIONS
John Patrick Grace: This season's flu likes to hit you twice, or more
Like a boomerang whipping back at you out of the blue, the flu I wrote about several weeks ago whacked me back into bed with a fever, aches and chills. Or so I thought.
Checking with Dr. Harry Tweel, the Cabell-Huntington Health Department's medical director, however, I learned that "if you've had one strain of flu, and gotten over it, you're inoculated and it won't come back."
Nonetheless, there is indeed "a rebound threat." It's very common, Dr. Tweel said, for a secondary bacterial infection to set in after a patient has battled back to health from the flu, which is always viral. It's also possible to come down with a different strain of the flu.
Those of you who thought you had "paid your dues" with one or two weeks in bed battling this bug, please keep the rebound threat in mind and be watchful.
I "stayed down" for about a week the first time, then limped through a second week partially back to work but still feeling weak and achy but with little or no fever. The cough that accompanied this flu, however, never really went away and came back with a vengeance with the second attack.
A friend of mine at the Corps of Engineers, hearing of my relapse, said, "You're the third person I've heard from that this has happened to. You think you're well and then you get sick again." Later I ran into someone else in the 4th Avenue building where I work who said he felt as if "the flu never really left. I've just been carrying it around for weeks, and now and then it flares up."
My own rebound illness took me by surprise. "Couldn't be," I told myself. "I shook this thing off a couple weeks ago." But then, sure enough, my temperature rose over 100 degrees, my body started aching all over, and my right leg and hip in particular experienced chills.
I moved back into the spare room and fired up the vaporizer, and I resumed my routine of orange juice laced with garlic, vitamin C and a variety of tinctures, hot tea and light solids. Talk about deja vu all over again!
What's worrisome, I know, is that flu can turn into pneumonia. Symptoms to watch for, I understand, are a general weakness and a closing down of the air passageways to and from the lungs; you'll feel like you're gasping for breath. In my case, bronchitis is also a threat, since I've had that, severely, twice before. In the case of bronchitis, the cough becomes persistent and wracking, and your chest feels packed with congestion.
Meanwhile, Dr. Tweel wants area residents to realize that flu is a potential killer. "Thirty-six thousand people, approximately, die from flu in the U.S. each year," he told me. Also, the 2007-08 flu season has been especially bad because for the first time in the last 16 years, the international medical experts did not get the right flu strain into the last round of flu shots.
This season's flu shot was effective for only about 40 percent of the flu viruses making the rounds, he said.
John Patrick Grace was the health editor for The Greensboro (N.C.) Record (now The News & Record) in the mid-1970s. He is now a book editor and publisher and lives in Huntington.
