So my son has the infamous H1N1, or as some know it, the swine flu. I have been terrified of this since it first came about. My kids both have adrenal disorders that make illness a tricky situation. They have to get extra meds as soon as they get sick. If you wait too long, they end up in the hospital. After seeing our son start to slide into a coma when he was an infant, my husband and I have been especially vigilant. So when I heard that H1N1 was making its rounds, I was definitely concerned.
But time passed, as it tends to do, and the urgency of the situation waned a bit. New cases pop up here and there all the time, but it's not much more than the regular seasonal flu anyway. With my husband being deployed and working constantly, rushing around to get the kids to and from daycare, and visiting my in-laws, I just stopped being as concerned.
Last weekend, however, H1N1 reared its ugly head right in my own home. My son spiked a fever over 103 and couldn't keep his meds down. For the first time in his 3 and a half years of life, I had to give him a shot of cortisol. Not fun, by the way. There's a sort of 'pop' feeling when you push the needle into the skin. Doing that to my own kid sucked. But having him go into a coma would suck more. After a visit to the pediatrician, the diagnosis was H1N1 and strep. Lovely.
So this past week has been spent disinfecting everything, keeping the house clean, and keeping my 7 month old daughter out of the house. Meanwhile, I'm still going to work, my mother-in-law comes over in the morning and hands me my daughter. I, in turn, hand over my son. He stays home with Nana, and I take my daughter to daycare and rush off to work. Come home after 8 hours and pick my daughter up from daycare, take her home, pass her back to my mother-in-law, who then hands my son back to me and then leaves with my father-in-law. It's been an exhausting week.
On top of all that, I've been researching. I've been looking up how H1N1 is doing everwhere and who it is hurting most. (people my age and a bit younger, as it turns out) Thanks to my searching on Twitter and following links there, I know that we have about 70-120 days to prepare for the second wave of the pandemic this fall. And thanks to Twitter, I have added about 20 people to follow.
In my search for more pandemic information, I found even more, unrelated, interesting information on social media and what one blogger calls the "Hive Mind" of Twitter.
Check out his blog here:
http://www.twitip.com/save-the-hive-mind/
Take a look and enjoy. You can tweet me http://twitter.com/ali_marea
The upcoming year looks to be challenging and full of uncertainty. But I have hope that we'll all come out of this stronger and wiser.
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