Emergency room for the flu?
That's what I thought. I've got it here in Tucson, but I haven't run to the emergency room!
It's a bad flu, and if you have allergies on top of it, the flu could kill you. I've already had it a week before Christmas. Up 40 hours without sleep. It's nothing to sneeze about.
Oh yeah, if it's a bad enough case. Anyone over 60 or so or under 7 or 8 generally gets told to go as a matter of course whenever flu symptoms start, and plenty of people outside those age ranges end up needing IV fluids because they puke themselves into dehydration. Plus of course anyone with any other medical condition is generally more susceptible to complications.
What others have said in this thread is absolutely right, though: this is completely normal. The ERs fill up with flu patients every winter without fail, and it's not at all newsworthy. It's so rote that one of the main things Homeland Security worries about is what to do if a bioterrorist attack were to hit at the same time as flu season, because the American hospital system doesn't have the resources to handle a flu outbreak and any other big bug at the same time. The flu patients alone generally max out hospital capacity for whatever few weeks per year it happens to hit in any given area. (And if the big bad "bird flu" ever comes to pass, hospitals won't be able to handle that at all.)
Yeah, the illegals use the emergency rooms for health care because they have to treat them for free. So, if you have an emergency, you can plan on waiting several hours for care because there are 250 illegals ahead of you with colds or the flu.
Oh, your mind would boggle with examples of what people go to the ER for.
People sometimes use the hospital for routine care because they are too lazy or "busy" to make an appointment with the doc. Then around 10:00 pm when there's nothing else to watch on TV, they trundle in with symptoms they've had for three days. They are also the ones who tend to complain the loudest because of the wait!!!
Heart attack, fever of 104+ and bones sticking through skin are pretty much my criteria. Severe flu with excessive vomiting may require IV fluids, which would be a good reason to go to the ER.
Of course, our family's lucky. The ER comes to us!!!
They're sicker than 90% of the others who walk in the door.
(Based on my experience anyway)