H1N1, More Personal Than Ever Imagined
If you’d asked me a month ago whether I was worried about 2009 H1N1 influenza, I would have told you “no, not really.”
After all, I felt like I was pretty well versed in the highlights of the pandemic; I began monitoring the development of H1N1 flu earlier this year (back when everyone still called it swine flu). I wrote an article, H1N1: What Health Care Workers Need to Know Now, on NurseZone.com, and I tried to keep current with all the latest developments. I even interviewed someone from the NIH about the vaccines. I felt like I had a handle on it.
And when I became pregnant back in the summer, I decided that I’d eventually get an H1N1 flu vaccination when they were released to the public, but I wasn’t really anxious about it. I figured, I knew the facts, and I felt pretty calm.
Then, in mid-October, my husband David got sick with H1N1. And he got sicker. And then he got sicker still.
As a pediatrician, David had been seeing young patients with confirmed and suspected cases of H1N1 for months. So he planned to get one of the very first FluMist H1N1 vaccines that were reserved for healthcare personnel in our community.
Unfortunately, the FluMist arrived too late.
David complained about feeling bad over the course of a few days. Then, he came home from work on a Wednesday morning with chills and a fever around 101. I can count on one hand the number of times he’s taken a sick day since medical school, so I knew he must have been feeling really, really miserable. The fever continued to creep upward, and the symptoms worsened.
H1N1 had arrived in our house.
Everyone in our family was considered a priority case for vaccination, so we were also considered priority cases for antiviral medication. I went to the drugstore with a prescription for Relenza for David, as well as a prescription from my obstetrician for Tamiflu for me. I also got Tamiflu for our three-year-old son, who has asthma.
We all dutifully took our meds and waited.
David’s condition worsened. All of his symptoms worsened. I had never seen him so sick in the decade we’ve been together. It was worse than I could have expected. I stood by the side of the bed and begged him to let me take him to the hospital. With sunken eyes and a deep, racking cough, he weakly pushed me away and asked for some more acetaminophen, not that it was doing much good.
Finally, by Sunday, I’d had enough. I called our primary care doctor’s office and told the on-call doctor about the situation. He instructed David to come in the next morning for a chest x-ray.
The x-ray showed pneumonia and a pleural effusion on the left lung. We both knew that it’s the secondary bacterial infections that are causing extreme complications and even death in some H1N1 patients. David’s only 35 years old, but just days earlier, we got word of a community leader who was just a decade or so older and had died of complications due to pneumonia. Not long afterward, a young healthy woman in her 20s died, too.
To say that I panicked is an understatement. What if the worst happened to him, too? Look how bad things already were!
I went back to the drugstore and brought home Clindamycin and Levaquin, two high-powered antibiotics. And we waited some more.
Fortunately, the antibiotics worked their magic. David began to improve. His appetite slowly returned, and his temperature began to approach normal levels. A week or so later, a second chest x-ray was blessedly clear.
I felt like dancing and singing. Instead, I took our son down to the health department to wait in line for one of a very limited supply of H1N1 injections that had just arrived. I was so eager to get both of us vaccinated that I got a speeding ticket along the way.
Now, a few weeks later, we’re all doing okay. My husband has returned to work, and while his strength has still not completely returned, he no longer resembles a corpse. My son and I haven’t gotten sick. We feel extremely lucky. And you know what? We ARE extremely lucky.
Our experience has made me rethink my rather laissez-faire attitude toward health care professionals getting vaccinated for H1N1. Several nursing organizations have publicly encouraged their members to get vaccinated but have stopped short of calling for mandatory vaccination. I won't go so far as to pound my fist down and demand that all health care professionals be vaccinated, either. But I will say that I now strongly urge the men and women who are caring for patients every day to carefully think about the risks of going unvaccinated.
What has your experience been with this illness? Please share your story by leaving a comment, right here on NurseConnect.