From the editor: Going viral

H1N1 doesn’t do this year’s diabolical flu strain justice—two letters plucked from the alphabet and a single digit to describe a ton of lead slamming your helpless body repeatedly to the couch, nightmarish days without rest, the debilitating nights

I probably didn’t take it seriously enough.

After all, at least three decades had elapsed since I last engaged in battle with the dreaded flu virus. I was quite a bit younger back then—some 30 years, in fact—therefore presumably more able to fend off its advances. And that instance, if I recall, was a relatively minor tussle with a weak strain.

On Christmas day, however, this year’s variant ambushed me. For four nights I tossed through less than an hour of sleep, on average. Feverish dreams piled words and numbers onto blank pages so rapidly my mind could not keep up, preventing any form of rest or rational thought.

It wasn’t pretty. For the first time in more than three decades I was forced to endure a New Year’s Eve without at least one bolstering shot of alcohol.

Like I said, H1N1 has the power to obliterate rational thought.

You have heard, certainly, of those cats at nursing homes adept at sniffing out those in their last moments. They snuggle up with terminal cases, offering a last evening of care and comfort.

Nice, right? Well, one evening in the throes of this flu I opened my eyes to find both of my pets—the needy Burglar and the destructive Panzer—butted up against me. “Great,” I thought. “I have service cats.”

So far I’ve survived, largely (I believe, though don’t verify this with a healthcare professional) by combining medication with vodka.

OK—I could have lined up for a flu shot. That is to say, if I did not have a phobia involving needles, I could have line up for the vaccine. In the past I’ve limped through a blood clot in my leg, tried to shake off a broken arm and played despite badly bruised ribs, happy to suffer the agony rather than numb (or resolve) the issue by taking a trip to the doctor.

Well, the coach did drag me off the field after my arm snapped in half. But I bravely refused pain killers … until the shock wore off.

Now, obviously I should know enough to take the flu virus at its word. One time it is the bird flu that knocks you down and drags you out. The next, it might be a strain associated with swine or some other animal. There’s little comfort. There is no “common” flu. Although we tend to lump “cold” and “flu” together into one respiratory lump, the latter has a rather deadly history.

Each year the flu virus kills dozens. Generally these are dismissed as elderly, young, or somehow infirm—susceptible to the nasty little bite of whichever iteration is unleashed in a particular season.

During legendary pandemic years, the flu virus has the capability of making bullets, shrapnel, poisonous gas and other tools of mass destruction seem trivial. On July 1, 1916 the British lost 60,000, killed or wounded, during a single day of the Somme offensive. One morning during the Meuse-Argonne battle, American Marines attacked several times across a field in the face of withering machine gun fire, only to be knocked back on each occasion. Before the next attempt, a Marine rallied his comrades with the stirring words “come on you sons of bitches, you want to live forever?” Another soldier—an Englishman—likened the act of going over the top to falling off a cliff. World War One killed some 20 million people, soldiers and civilians, between 1914 and 1918.

And that was nothing at all.

In 1918, the flu broke out, flaring up all over the world. Over a year and a half, an estimated 30 to 50 million people around the world died, coughing and thrashing under covers. The president of Brazil succumbed to the flu, as did the mayor of Denver. Baseball player Larry Chappell was listed as a victim, as was hockey star Joe Hall. In the U.S., some 675,000 fell to the virus—double the number shot down in combat.

This year’s flu virus is just a list of letters and numbers. How those add up, however, is a matter that should be of great concern.