New content, cool games, and news from TheSite staff - it's all here. Now where's the tea?

All | Community updates | Announcements | New content | Fun

Wednesday Aug 05, 2009

Surviving the pig pox

It's depressingly ironic. Just over three months ago I shimmied into the YouthNet offices to start my new job as a journalist. The very first piece I wrote for TheSite.org was this one here on swine flu. Two months later, I was the very first person at YouthNet to come down with it. If I'd known that was the deal, I'd have made my debut with an article on coping with sudden and unexpected wealth.

Still, swine flu. I've had it and yet I live and breathe and walk amongst you. Because it is just flu, despite the near apocalyptic tone some branches of the media have taken. Influenza in any form is a nasty little bug, but the buzz on this particular viral is out of proportion to the average person's swine flu experience.

My own case started at around 3am one Tuesday morning, when I woke up, started being violently sick and carried on until eight in the morning, pausing only to fall into semi-sleep on a towel on the bathroom floor. My head pounded; I had a weird, diffuse red light in the corners of my eyes; every muscle in my body felt as though it had been roughly pulled out and pushed back into the wrong place. All that carried on for two days, two days where I couldn't stay awake for more than an hour and remained the same temperature as downtown Mumbai in the summertime. Then followed three days where my legs didn't really work, my voice failed and I was infectious.  I've never been so grateful to Facebook and Twitter for providing social contact at a distance.

I've had better weeks, obviously, but I didn't die. Flu is always going to be vile, but it's a fairly everyday disease. Swine flu, however, made my week of manky illness really interesting to everyone else. I was news. It was sort of like being famous, with everyone clamouring to know "what was it like? What was it like?" Well, it was like having flu. Don't believe the hype.

Posted by Anna ( 1:48 PM ) Link to this post  |  Comments[1]