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Finally someone describes the flu accurately. It kicks your ass! If it doesn’t kick your ass it’s not the flu.

In 1978 I contracted the so called Russian flu when I was in HS.

I got up that morning feeling OK only perhaps a bit more tired than usual. I got dressed, boarded my buss and went to class. But by the third period I felt like I was going to fall out of my chair – weak and dizzy and feverish. And I ached all over and was sneezing and coughing severely by now. I went to the nurse’s office and there was about 3 dozen other kids there with the very same symptoms. When the nurse finally got to me she called my mom. But my mom didn’t have a car nor did she ever learn to drive and my dad worked construction and this being long before cell phones, there was no way to reach him on his job site. So the nurse, with my mother’s permission allowed me to take a mass transit bus home.

And it wasn’t just one bus but two with a transfer in mid-town Baltimore and then a 15 block walk home. I sort of remember walking those last couple of blocks home and thinking I wasn’t going to make it.

When I finally did make it home I waked in the front door, threw off my coat and dropped it and my book bag near the front door and climbed into bed with my clothes still on.

My mother came into my room and felt my head and I was burning up with fever. She took my temp and it was 104. But what I remember the most was the body aches, like all my joints and bones were broken and the headache as if my skull had been split in two with an axe and I was light sensitive so my mom put blankets up over my window curtains and put ice cold wash cloths on my forehead. And I was just so weak that I could barely lift my head off my pillow and these symptoms went on for days. Then came the cough and the congestion that felt like an elephant was standing on my chest, on the 3rd day so bad that I struggled to breath. At one point I actually though I might die and my parents considered taking me to the ER. But I was afraid and talked them out of it and the next day was a bit better.

One of my friend’s mother’s called the night I had come home to see how I was doing and to also tell her that her daughter was also sick with it too as were so many others from my school. So many kids got sick, over half the school, that the school postponed our mid-term exams.

When I finally got well enough to go back to school a week and a half later, but still not feeling 100%, there was still a lot of kids and even some teachers, mostly the younger ones out too, so we had to go to combined classrooms because of all the kids and teachers still out sick. Our mid-terms were postponed for another two weeks, then a blizzard came it was postponed for another week.

The last time I got the flu was around 2001. Again, I got up that Monday morning feeling OK but a bit more tired than usual. I went to work but my boss noticed I looked rather pale and asked if I was OK and I was having trouble getting warm, a sweater and the heater under my desk turned up full blast wasn’t helping and I couldn’t concentrate. Then shortly afterward felt nauseous and ran to the bathroom and threw up a couple of times, then came the sneezing and the sore throat and the aches and I went home. When my husband got home that night, I was a hot mess, literally a hot mess with the fever and a sore throat that felt like I had gargled razor blades and then the coughing and chest congestion, some more vomiting and diarrhea followed and then the bone breaking body aches.

I decided to sleep on the couch as one, it was close to a bathroom and close to the kitchen and didn’t necessitate me climbing any stairs as I was just too weak to do so and also so perhaps I wouldn’t give it to my husband or keep him awake with my moaning and groaning and tossing and turning as God knows, it was keeping me up, I hardly slept for days mostly because of the body aches, just intermittently. After the third day I was still running a high fever despite taking Tylenol and other cold and flu OTC’s

I spent the next week on that couch, eventually eating some canned chicken soup and crackers but not much else except for lots of ice water, ginger ale and tea with honey.

That Sunday I was starting to feel a bit better so my husband encouraged me to get showered and dressed and go with him to the grocery store. And it was good to get showered and dressed and get out of the house but thank God for the grocery cart because I was still so week that I used it sort of like a walker and at times felt like I might pass out.

I finally got back to work that Tuesday.

I had kept in touch with my boss every day I was out and learned that over half of our department and over a third of the company had fell sick with the flu too. He didn’t get it and was struggling to keep up with the work load and was so happy to see me come back to work.

You are right, a cold can make you feel miserable for a day or two, but the flu really kicks your ass.

I think a lot of people get a sore throat and the sniffles and think they have the flu when what they really have is a cold.

But FWIW, even a cold can bring complications.

In 2005 I got a rather mild head cold, and not even so bad that I stayed home from work. But then a couple of days later after the cold seemed to have gone away, I was on out that Sunday with some friend’s bowling, I felt like I had an eye lash or sand in my eye, and it very rapidly got very red and was weeping uncontrollably. As I drove home, I could hardly see out of it and had a steady stream of yellow puss streaming out of it. When I got home I washed my face with a clean wash cloth, put some Visine in my eye and went to bed.

The next morning it was worse. Both eyes were plaster shut with copious amounts of dried puss. And now my other eye was now also very red and swollen and by swollen, the eye ball was swollen and so were my eye lids. So I thought – “great I must have pink eye”. But I was also now running a 103 fever and now couldn’t see very well out of either eye and was still streaming puss out of them.

So I called my doc who told me to come in as soon as I could but had to call my niece to drive me. By the time she got there, not only my eyes but now my entire face was red and swollen and her reaction was that I looked like Regan from the Exorcist.

When my doc saw me the first and only thing he said was “Don’t Touch Anything! I mean it put your hands up in the air and follow me without touching anything! DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!” Then he called the Wilmer Eye clinic but they had no openings so he called a nearby eye specialist center that agreed to see me right away.

When I got to the eye specialist, not one, not two but three doctors examined me and told me it was the worst case of conjunctivitis they had ever seen and wanted to admit me to the hospital, they said it was acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis.

One of the docs told me that a lot of GP’s overreact over pink eye but in my case, my GP was correct to send me to them. I balked at being admitted to the hospital so they gave me several Rx’s - a steroid eye cream, an antibiotic eye cream and a very strong oral antibiotic. They told me that my “pink eye” probably started out as virial because of my head cold, likely an Enterovirus but that I had also picked up a secondary bacterial infection.

I asked if I was in danger of losing my eyesight and they said “no, probably not” (and that wasn’t reassuring) but I had to go back to them the very next day to get checked on and if it wasn’t any better or had gotten any worse, I would have no choice but to be admitted to the hospital.

Fortunately, it didn’t get worse and eventually got a bit better but I was quarantined and not able to go to work for the two weeks. And I had to throw out all my makeup and wash all my towels, wash cloths, bed cloths, pillows and pillow cases in very hot water and with lots of bleach and I had to go back two more times before they determined me cleared from the infection.

Viruses are sometimes no laughing matter.