The Lost Week

I remem­ber when I read ‘The Hot Zone’, Richard Preston’s non-fiction account of killer germs like Mar­burg, Ebola, and other hem­or­rhagic fevers. I was truly ter­ri­fied, but I remem­ber being less scared by his his­tor­i­cal back­ground mate­r­ial on the Span­ish Flu pan­demic of 1918. It’s true, it killed nearly 25 mil­lion in its first 25 weeks. ‘But that was so long ago, I thought, ‘with Med­ical Sci­ence not suf­fi­ciently advanced or able to deal with sim­ple things, like the flu. After all, we now have flu shots, peni­cillin and the like.’

If the con­stant scares about ‘bird flu’ haven’t given the term a new weight (and they recently killed thou­sands of turkeys in nearby Abbots­ford because one of them had been found to have con­tracted it), I have a new rea­son to be respect­ful.  I was infected with some strain of Influenza on Fri­day, Febu­rary 20^th, and I effec­tively dis­ap­peared from daily life until roughly today, 8 days later (and I can’t even be pos­i­tive that it has utterly, com­pletely and totally left me — I really hope that the SOB has). With­out going into the gory details, I was out of it for nearly the whole week and mis­er­able. This meant that I not only missed some busi­ness meet­ings (but no dead­lines, thank good­ness), but also the sec­ond day of North­ern Voice (which by many accounts was the best ever), a Blog­ger Meetup, and Launch Party Vol 6, all which I was look­ing for­ward to attend­ing. There’s truly no good time to come down with the flu, but a knock-you-on-your-ass case this week was truly unfortunate.

Last year, at this time, Pam was on her trip to Antarc­tica, and I came down with a case of the flu then as well (although noth­ing as severe and long as this one). That year, as with this year, I had got­ten a flu shot, but I lost the gam­ble that it cov­ered the strain that I caught. You only have a roughly 1 in 3 chance that the shots actu­ally will do the trick, and so far, over the past 3 years, I’m pretty much get­ting that hit rate. (1 hit, 2 misses)

I hope this (get­ting the flu, that is) doesn’t become a reg­u­lar,  last week in Feb­ru­ary event, because we are plan­ning on a trip in almost exactly a year’s time.

In the mean­time, I’ll write more when I get my strength back.