Erin Miller

The doctor had been out of the room for five minutes. I should have known how sick I was because I was starting to think that the exam table looked like a fine place to curl up and rest. I had to lift myself up when the doctor walked in. He plastered himself against the far wall, handed me a mask and said, “well, you tested positive for influenza.”
great — I guess now I know what it feels like.
It’s too late to try any anti-viral stuff for it, so for now it is just rest, chicken soup, and kleenexes. It forces me to spend lots of time at home, and I feel like I should be getting stuff done — working on internship applications, getting caught up on reading, getting ahead on assignments — but mostly all I can do is sit around and let my nose run and my eyes water. I’ve already had to attend to the liquid falling out of my face twice since I started writing this.
At my appointment, from under my mask, I optimistically looked at the doctor and said, “So, I’ll be better in a week?” He took another half step backward and said, “um, no, maybe in ten days.”
People often toss the word flu around to mean any general cold or stomach upset. I remember when I use to give flu shots, I would sometimes recommend them to parents or their children and they would say something like, “ah, it’s just the flu.” I was always tempted to say something similar to, “no, what you are talking about is a cold, what I am talking about is more like the plague.” (For the record, yes, I did get my flu shot this year, but apparently it wasn’t that good a guess.) Anyway, I just finished a book about the black plague — the sneezing, the watering eyes, the insatiable thirst — the images are not entirely comforting. The book talked a lot about bleeding from the nose though — and so far, so good on that one.