AJ O'Leary

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I Caught “Swine Flu”. I Hope Doctors Take COVID-19 More Seriously Than They Took Me.

Coronavirus probably isn’t The Big One, but let’s not get complacent

This article was written on March 4, 2020, and reflects the climate of the time period.

I’m a person you could describe as ‘generally healthy, but illness-prone’. If there’s something contagious going around, I’ll probably catch it. Pneumonia? Been there. Seasonal flu? Had that. Mono? Yes, in adulthood. Meningitis? Yup. (That one’s a story of its own for another day.) I’m just old enough to have experienced chickenpox before vaccines for it were as much of a rite of passage through childhood as a tetanus shot. THAT one sucked.

My folks chalked my tendency to catch things up to bad luck throughout my early childhood, but eventually a culprit emerged: Celiac disease. I was diagnosed through testing at age 15 in 2008, ending years of speculation by doctors and school administrators alike who claimed I was frequently stricken with mild-to-moderate ailments because I ‘liked being sick’.

Celiac disease is part of the family of autoimmune diseases, meaning that my immune system doesn’t work quite like everyone else’s — and that eating wheat gluten, in my particular case, makes matters worse. I can still live a normal, productive life, so long as I stay away from wheat gluten, but I’m a little more likely to catch a cold than most people. It also doesn’t help that my problem went untreated for 15 years, partially because of doctors who brushed my problem off and told me that, yet again, perhaps I enjoyed being sick.

My most vivid brush with a nasty illness came just a year after my diagnosis, in June 2009. I came down with the usual symptoms that heralded a Generic, Unspecified Respiratory Thing That Goes Away On Its Own for me so many times before: a fever, a sore throat, joint aches, and coughing.

My typical course of action for such a thing was to take DayQuil and hope it would go away; at the time, the prevailing wisdom (at least where I lived in the United States) was that you had to display symptoms for an ungodly length of time before doctors would even treat it as something other than a cold.

This Generic Unspecified Thing (I promise I didn’t purposely shorten it to “G.U.T.”, but we’ll roll with it) just so happened to coincide with the rise of H1N1 influenza, or “swine flu”, the less-deadly cousin of the notorious “Spanish flu”. H1N1 swept the world up in a literal and metaphorical frenzy like its related contagion from almost a century earlier.

Being a bookish teen with a love for stats and research, and concerned with my own well-being even before coming down with my G.U.T. thanks to my autoimmune disease, I absorbed all the information about the fast-spreading illness I could find. I believed most fear of H1N1 (and “new” illnesses in general) to be rooted in the thought of the unknown, and decided my first line of defense would be knowledge.

I gradually soothed the concerns of myself and others as I tracked H1N1's spread online; watching the mortality rate drop steadily from a disturbingly high early quoted figure of 4 percent to something more in line with the seasonal flu as new cases came in and learning that it had “a low mortality, but high morbidity” — or that it was very contagious, and could make its victims sick for a lengthy period of time, but was generally not deadly — helped me sleep easier at night, in a sort of macabre way.

As the days wore on, and I remained sick with my G.U.T. as ever, that “low mortality, high morbidity” phrase I’d internalized while doing my research stuck in my mind like a ten-ton weight. I couldn’t have swine flu. Right? Not me, right? I couldn’t possibly be affected, even though I was far sicker for far longer than a normal cold would suggest, because I’d been told so many times before that I was making my own problems worse in my head. Right?

Around day 9 of my G.U.T., my parents finally took me to see my pediatrician. He listened to my lungs; not good, I recall him saying. He looked at my throat; inflamed, he remarked.

Never being one to beat around the bush, especially not as a prickly teenager, I pressed the question then and there: “Could this be swine flu?”

“Well, yeah, sure, I guess it could be.”

Life may be an inexact science, but that doesn’t make conjecture from your doctor any more reassuring, especially when this is the same pediatrician who once shrugged your Celiac disease off until you insisted on going through a revolving door of specialists and would frequently tell you that any other problems you were experiencing with your life were “nothing to lose sleep over”, sometimes ascribing them to “Sunday night syndrome”, or a supposed desire to avoid going to school.

“Could it be? Yeah, sure, but it’s June, and it’s getting warmer outside, so I wouldn’t be worried.” (I assume that last comment was because conventional wisdom holds that illnesses like H1N1 and this year’s COVID-19 die off in hotter temperatures, even though current research suggests weather has little, or nothing, to do with it.)

I wasn’t interested in creating more problems in my life by continuing to not worry about being sick, so I pressed for a test. Luckily for me, Wisconsin at the time had some of the best testing capabilities available in the country. I ended up getting my wish, thanks in part to my parents’ shared persistence and their good health insurance, and guess what the end result ultimately was?

I had H1N1 influenza! What a world!

All told, I ended up being sick with H1N1 influenza for almost three weeks. By the time it was out of my system and I made my recovery, I’d blown out a big portion of my summer vacation being sick in bed and ate up half my parents’ grocery budget for the month on Gatorade and Pedialyte.

Fast forward to 2020. We’re here again, 11 years later, in the grips of COVID-19, or “the coronavirus”, another “new” pathogen encircling the globe.

Interested as ever in protecting my own vulnerable condition, I currently find myself buried deep in the constant outpouring of COVID-19 news from the World Health Organization and other sources. I hear the stories of individuals who display symptoms in hard-hit regions and were denied a test because they’re caught in a bureaucratic feedback loop, or people who have reasonable suspicion to believe they could be impacted but are also being refused tests because they “don’t meet the criteria”. I look at all this coverage and can’t help but think back to that painful memory of my doctor shrugging me off, like he’d done so many times before, probably thinking I was looking for another easy way to cut class.

The broken state of American healthcare’s role in complicating testing for COVID-19 cannot be excused, to be sure, but my own experiences still cause me to fear for the children who may end up with health complications lasting the rest of their life because a doctor told them to stop avoiding their responsibilities.

I worry about how many of today’s teenagers who “look healthy”, but suffer from various health-related risk factors not visible to the naked eye, will get blown off by their doctors over the next few months when they come in with their own flu-like symptoms.

I fear for the kid who goes to their school’s office, says they don’t feel well, has their temperature taken, and gets sent back to class by an annoyed administrator telling them to get over their “springtime sniffles” because the thermometer reads 99.7 and there’s a poster hanging up on the wall reading “FEVER BEGINS AT 100.4 DEGREES!” like the one my elementary school had. (It looks as if one American school district may already be doing this exact thing.) I get depressed thinking about how many people of all ages will be told to go home, eat a popsicle, and stop wasting the poor old doc’s time.

We are living through, as the WHO recently claimed, a “decisive point” for the world’s battle against COVID-19. We kind of got off easy with H1N1’s low mortality rate, relatively speaking. H1N1 wasn’t the end of the world, and COVID-19 won’t be, either, but pandemics are a forever war.

I can even feel us getting sort of complacent in COVID-19 being relatively mild compared to some of its own cousins, like SARS and MERS. It’s okay for the general public to be like this, to an extent, as a coping mechanism. It’s good to be prepared, but not panic.

It’s not fine, however, for doctors to tell children, or anyone, who comes in sick at this decisive point that they’re just complaining and to automatically dismiss their concerns. It’s absolutely not okay to dismiss us individuals with underlying health concerns, especially when it’s already quite well documented that COVID-19, just like any other illness in existence, places us at greater risk regardless of age. One-size-fits-all procedures and solutions don’t accommodate at-risk individuals.

Keep that in mind the next time you see someone like me taking drastic measures to protect ourselves as best as we can from COVID-19, seasonal flu, or God forbid, a future pandemic more dastardly than what we’re currently fighting.

And please, to all the doctors and nurses out there: now is not the time to play God with your patients. We just want to live healthy, happy lives with bright, sunny futures, just like you do.

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