If you are over 55, in the name of all that is holy, GET A FLU SHOT.
As I mentioned in my post from a week ago, Ben brought the flu home and graciously shared it with me. Last fall when I started seeing the ads for flu shots I thought “I really need to schedule mine,” but with everything else going on in our lives at the moment, we both kept pushing it off, and we’ve now both paid the price—me especially. (Ben is more or less back to normal at this point.)
I’ve been in the hospital since Tuesday. That morning I started hacking up stuff whose description is best left to the imagination and my O2 sats were under 90%, so together we ran over to Urgent Care. The doctor took one listen to my lungs and said, “You need to go to the ER immediately.”
So we ran over to the same hospital where I’ve had everything else done over the past year. To their credit, I was whisked immediately back and put in an isolation room and after meeting with a doctor, treatment was started. I stayed there for the next THIRTY EIGHT HOURS while waiting for a room to become available upstairs.
It seems my flu had morphed into bacterial pneumonia which—as we all know for people over a certain age—is a very dangerous thing to acquire. Since Tuesday I’ve been on some heavy duty IV antibiotics, multiple bdaily reathing treatments, and supplemental oxygen. I’m supposedly well enough to be sent home later today (with an oxygen concentrator to use as needed). Normally I’d be champing at the bit to go home, but as my Nurse Practitioner friend so succinctly put it, “You’re in the safest place you could be right now.”
So…if you’re an old fart, don’t ever forget that yearly flu shot. After all this, going forward I know I won’t.