i already got my h1n1 shot so im good to go
M62 KIT for sale PM ME
^ same here. had it a few weeks ago, rested for 3 days and drank a @!#$ ton of water and i was as good as ever. it's really not near as bad as the media makes it out to be.
Check out my build thread!
OK. I'm a health care worker with some information on the H1N1, specifically the pediatric population.
I live in the Rio Grande Valley, the site of the first death of a US citizen from confirmed swine flu...happened in my hospital, in my town.
If you go to the doctor and they tell you that you have Type A, you could have either seasonal or swine. Mostly likely swine because it's becoming ridiculously common. Will they continue testing? Some of the offices I've gone to will send it out, others wont. If you go in and get tested, they cannot tell you if it is seasonal or H1N1 on the spot. It's a send out. Regardless, they just give them medications to treat it paliatively and if they're high risk they start tamiflu, really high risk they get admitted. Same as normal flu.
HOWEVER. The swine flu hits some people really hard. There's no real known indicator for what exactly it is, but some people it really hits them hard. One of my patients, who's a chronic kid..like really chronic..was diagnosed with swine flu. He had 2 episodes of fever, started on tamiflu. That was it. Nothing else occured. Now, this 13 year old that's in the unit that's probably going to die. He was perfectly healthy, in football so he was active. Got sick, got treatment, but didn't really get better.
Does this mean we should all freak out? No. It just means if you get sick you need to get checked ASAP. The sooner you get on medication the better. Is this like a russian roulette type of situation? Hell no. Every test we've sent out from the floor has been H1N1 positive. Two hospitalists have told me that the seasonal flu hasn't even hit our area yet. If you knew the number of people seen with H1N1 that didn't even require treatment to the number that did you probably wouldn't worry as much.
I can tell you from a few years of being there..the PICU and Pedi floor looks identical to how it always looks this time of year. Type A flu. But it's honestly way better than previous years. Probably because people are so worried about the swine flu the second their kids get sick they actually take them to the damn doctor instead of waiting for them to have respiratory issues.
Two things...
First of all, I think that it should be noted that H1N1 poses more of a threat to the younger population, as opposed to the aged 65+ population that usually suffers most influenza deaths. I think that changes the game, does it not? I didn't take the time to look at the ages of anyone here, and I'm not trying to say you guys don't have young ones in your lives that you care about, because I"m sure you do, but I will voice my opinion because it resonates off of this statistic (or fact, whatever you call it), which I found on webmd.com...
I'm a freshly-turned-21 college male, and while I haven't done any triathlons lately, I'm not unhealthy either. I was a 3 sport varsity athlete in high school, and have since then always made it to the rec-center at least 2 or 3 times a week to keep fit, I eat plenty of fresh foods with my diet, not to mention I start every day off with a dose of vitamin C, as of this fall. Now I don't think I have ever, since I can remember, been sick enough to where it completely sidelined me for 3 days. That is until a few weeks ago when I, like so many other college students, didn't take all the H1N1 flyers seriously and ended up on my ass. And it's not like the 24 hour bug people get from time to time. In a day's time I went from feeling fine to feeling sick enough to go to the doctor, which is saying a lot for this young, arrogant, big headed college guy who has always been the "I'm too young/healthy to get hurt" type. I went to the family doctor since I don't go to school too far from home, and he said it was the H1N1. He wrote the Tamiflu scripts, and basically told me it was like any other flu, in that most of it was just letting my body recover on its own.
Well I did just that, but not before body aches beat anything sports had ever left me with before, extreme extreme EXTREME fatigue (yet not being able to sleep at night, due to the fact that I was sweating through my blankets with the heat off and windows open in central Indiana), constant trips to the bathroom (not ever knowing ahead which end it was gonna be that time, if you get my drift), and dehydration so bad that I was drinking 7-10 of the bigger sized gatorade bottles full of water per day on top of what I normally drink and it wasn't helping.
But here's the kicker... I go to Purdue University which is a moderately large sized college, full of students my age in the 18-25 ish range. And it seems like
everyone is getting really sick here. My lecture classes have taken a serious dent in attendance, my friends have told me about it personally, I've heard other people talking about it, but this has hit us so quick and hard we didn't know what happened. I mean the whole fall semester you would read about the cases in the paper, and you'd hear about a friend of a friend of a friend who had "swine flu," but all of a sudden in the course of a week it was all your friends, and yourself too. Almost like it had been in a dormant state, or maybe just hadn't infected enough people to spread that fast yet, and then once it got to strength everyone including the healthy ones.
And even if I wasn't so close-minded before, I would of had a tough time getting a flu shot as there were 400 sent to our university. The rest of the surrounding area is running low/out too. Now I'm not a supporter of Euthanasia, and please please don't take this the wrong way. But quite a few of the people who normally die from the flu, a.k.a. the 65 and over crowd, are probably not in the right physical condition to fight off the virus, as much as the younger people are. This also brings up the point that the current numbers are somewhat misleading because a lot of the mortalities that you hear about from the "normal" flue are in this older age group, where with H1N1 it's all ages but mostly the younger crowd..... but anyways, a lot of the people who die every year from flu are elderly and unhealthy anyways. But what would a population do, if by some chance, part of an entire generation was wiped out? The people all preparing to run the world someday all got sick and died? Then what? True, this is over-dramatic, but with health and safety there should be no room for anything else but seriousness.
Sooooo to sum this all up... as a red blooded, born and raised on a farm, Obama uhhh... disliking...., Black/Gold bleeding, care free young male, who has never gave a damn about this stuff before, like West-Nile and Bird Flu, but this time I'm actually worried. So I think that this is a health emergency... Now what I disagree with is the big fancy name "National Medical Emergency" and the fact that Obama "declares" it (like a war? lol). I think that they might of stirred up concern a little too much, as a result. Probably would of been just as well off sending alerts or advisories to doctors or public health officials around the country.
great words deuce I couldnt have said it better myself.
