Got swine flu?

Just about everyone in our neighborhood has. With a large population of young children (four school buses are necessary to cart just the elementary students) and the fact that most adults get to work by mass transit, if something's going around, it usually gets here first.

My son Max was mildly sick for a couple days. He tested positive for flu. The genetic typing test would take six months or more to be done, but the odds of this being some other kind of flu are 5000-1 or so. So our doctor told us that meant Max had H1N1.

Sam got the flu a couple days later, and he, too, recovered after two days. He trick or treated on Halloween, and then he woke up Sunday morning with a bad cough. His fever hit nearly 104 by midnight.

Back to the doctor on Monday, who prescribed amoxicillin. Sam's fever crashed within hours. He's still got a cough (we all do), but the fever has remained away for a week. So much for the swine flu.

This story is typical among folks who have had swine flu. It can hit with varying symptoms, but most aren't serious. The big problems are secondary infections like the pneumonia Sam picked up. Our doctor told us that ear infections are also common among kids. Luckily, almost all of the secondary infections are easily treatable by one form of penicillin or another.

Every time there's a flu scare, folks bring up the 1918 swine flu (or "Spanish" flu) and the tens of millions it killed. I've gone back into some of the writings on that flu (from that time period and more recent), and it seems to me (a complete nonexpert) that the big problem back then wasn't the flu itself, but the secondary infections.

Our doctor told us that this flu can "present" as bifurcated. That is, you get sick, you get better and then the fever comes back. This is a jargon that appears over and over in reports on the 1918 flu. I can't tell you how many cases of death occurred after it seemed the flu was gone. No one says this, but I'm guessing that a lot of the "returning flu" was a secondary infection. Pneumonia, say, which was completely untreatable in 1918, as antibiotics (penicillin, in particular) weren't available for almost two more decades. Bacterial infections are incredibly tough to fight even now that we have access to a wide range of antibiotics. Back then, all you could do was make a person comfortable and hope their body somehow knocked out the bacteria.

Our doctor was relatively non-chalant about the flu itself. She said the virus doesn't appear to make people sicker than the "regular" flu. She also said that we had to be very careful about the secondary infections. We listened, got Sam back in the office when his fever spiked and he's just fine now.

Our family has health insurance. It's not great, but it does mean that we can call up a doctor, go to an office at an arranged time and take care of things without having to wait hours in a urgent care center of emergency room. I didn't have to pay up front--I simply got billed. Also, I knew I wouldn't be out hundreds of bucks rather than the hundred or so in co-pays that we owe. You might think that no parent would think about cost before getting medical attention for their child, but I think that's a calculus that is performed far more than we would like to believe.

I don't like large elements of the health care bill. But I don't worry about a "lack of choice." Anyone with health insurance already has to make choices about doctors and treatments, and often enough the first choice isn't available. I don't worry about "death panels." I don't worry about the dread creep of socialism. I want to make sure that as many people as possible are insured. That makes everyone healthier.

The folks downtown (from me) aren't talking about the flu when they discuss the health care bills, but they should be. We are in the middle of a pandemic, even if it is a relatively benign one (except for the very unlucky). How many people will die because they waited too long to see a doctor? How many people waited too long because they didn't have insurance? These are questions we should be asking, not the ideological nonsense that's being bandied about.

But hey, Camp H1N1 has officially been closed at my house. It's back to soccer, cruising the neighborhood on bikes and all the other good things about the fall. Best of all, no waiting in line for the vaccine. We're done, baby!

Jon Worley isn't sure if he actually got the flu, but he is coughing up some serious loogeys.