It’s been a very busy month, between my wife healing up from her concussion, and going back to phone triage through the Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota. I still pick up at least two shifts a month on the Spinal Cord Injury/Disorder’s unit at the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis.

To say work has been busy would be an understatement on the order of saying that Morné Steyn has been a decent fly-half for the Blue Bulls and Springboks.

The health care workplace has been nothing short of insane this past month-due in no small measure to the H1N1 Virus (Sometimes called “The Swine Flu”). Every night at work, we are so busy, that we have patients waiting anywhere from two to 8 hours for a phone triage nurse to get back to them to go through their or their child’s symptoms(And this, after my work hired several new nurses to man the phones). In the world of phone triage, handling over 50 calls a night was a busy night-about 6 an hour with the odd bathroom and snack break. This past two weeks, I have been averaging over 70 calls per 8 hour shift.

It has been the perfect storm brewing: many people in Minnesota were already getting flu symptoms back in early September, there are a lot of people with flu-like illness out there, but in my opinion the biggest driving force has been the media in the US, to say nothing of the media here in the Twin Cities, which has parents absolutely white with fear that the minute their child has the sniffles, they are going to die after news of a person who died of flu complications hits the airwaves(Most fatalities, by the way, the person had an underlying health issue). Add all of this together, and it has made the perfect Halloween season witch’s brew of panic here in the upper Midwest. As crazy as it has been at work, the people I really feel sorry for are the nurses and doctors working in the packed Emergency Rooms and Urgent Cares, who are having to deal with this mass of coughing, sneezing and febrile humanity. The thing is, most people don’t need to be going to the ER. Sure, there are people who are having respiratory distress symptoms who should be there, but most people don’t realize that this is a VIRUS-antibiotics don’t work. There is an antiviral drug called Tamiflu, but contrary to what some parents think, it is NOT a cure-it should help decrease the severity of the symptoms and may lesson the flu by a day to a day and a half.

The people who SHOULD be on the Tamiflu are people within the first hours of onset of flu-like symptoms(Fever, cough, sneezing, sore throat, headache, bodyaches are the most common) are people under the age of two, people with diminished immune symptoms and chronic illnesses like asthma, heart problems and diabetes and pregnant women(Women’s immune systems take a hit when they are pregnant)-to name a few. For most healthy people, it’s a question of giving over the counter medicines for fever and bodyaches, pushing fluids and riding the flu out.

The one thing that people are forgetting in these panicked times is that the fatality rate of H1N1 influenza is THE SAME as regular seasonal flu.

I guess that I should not complain, I am not actually having people cough all over me like those in the ER’s, UCC’s and clinics, and as one of my co workers pointed out during a particularly busy evening this week: “At least we have job security”. A sliver lining to think about during these tough times.

It’s been a tough flu season, but to try to put this into some level of historical perspective, I would strongly recommend the book “The Great Influenza” by John M. Barry. This is a book that dealt with the great Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19. (This flu killed more American Soldiers than German bullets and artillery during WWI) If you read this book, it gives a whole level of perspective to the current flu season that we are having.