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Rym Ghazal Wearing a medical face mask and a mismatched sweat suit, my friend couldn’t get a single taxi to stop and take him home. It wasn’t until he removed the face mask that he could get a cab, but not without feeling guilty all the way home about the possibility of having infected his cab driver with the swine flu.
“What could I do, no one would take me home, and I was so tired and sick that I just wanted to be in bed,” said my 30-year old friend.
He believes he caught the flu while in London but he doesn’t know for sure. He lives in Dubai but became ill while visiting friends in London and Germany.
" With more than 4,000 deaths and 300,000 cases worldwide, my friend, who also has reported on swine flu for the TV station he works for, started to panic as he remembered that he suffered from a heart condition " He felt feverish within hours of arriving in Berlin, and didn’t think much of it until he started to hallucinate that evening.
“These cubic things kept appearing before my eyes and flying towards me,” he said. The fever got so bad that he called an ambulance and was taken to the nearest hospital. He had the typical flu symptoms, high fever, aching muscles, cough, sore throat, stuffy nose, chills and fatigue. And after some tests the doctors confirmed that he had indeed contracted H1N1.
With more than 4,000 deaths and 300,000 cases worldwide, my friend, who also has reported on swine flu for the TV station he works for, started to panic as he remembered that he suffered from a heart condition. He kept telling the doctors that he had a heart problem, and since he would be included among the “vulnerable” people he had reported that were more likely to die from the virus, he asked his doctors about his chance of survival.
The doctors just smiled and told him not to worry.
“I just wanted to slap them because they seemed not to be concerned at all,” he said. |
" It is understandable that no one would willingly go and get themselves sick or even expose themselves to a severe flu " The doctors, after successfully bringing his fever down, gave him a packet of Tamiflu and told him to go home.
“Just sleep in your bed, and don’t allow anyone to come into contact with you,” said one of the doctors, who left to deal with another flu patient who had arrived in the emergency room.
And that is how my friend ended up standing in the middle of the night, waiting for a taxi.
For an entire week he stayed home, and despite his requests for soup and visits since he was “feeling blue”, none of his friends came over and neither did his relatives.
“People were just scared to get it from me,” he said. “It was one of the worst weeks of my life, as I felt very alone.”
It is understandable that no one would willingly go and get themselves sick or even expose themselves to a severe flu.
When he was describing his symptoms to me, I recalled how during last year’s Haj, I also caught something that caused me to hallucinate as he did. Right in the middle of the rituals, those nearby could see me dodging something as if avoiding a collision with baseball-shaped objects flying towards me. It made it difficult to focus on the pilgrimage.
I headed to one of the portable clinics but I hesitated in telling what I was experiencing to a doctor as I was worried he might just diagnose me with “lost mind”, but he actually knew what I was experiencing. |
" When I went back to my shared quarters with the other female pilgrims, I tried my best not to infect anyone, wearing a mask and not sharing any of my things " “Yes yes, you have the African flu,” he told me. I had a very high fever, so high that at one point I didn’t even notice it. Slowly, I started to feel aches in my muscles and joints. It seems that there are so many different versions of the flu, and that for all I know, the flu I got during Haj may well have been related to H1N1. Who knows.
When I went back to my shared quarters with the other female pilgrims, I tried my best not to infect anyone, wearing a mask and not sharing any of my things. Nonetheless, they would often snap at me and express great anger at my presence. But I had nowhere else to go.
Eventually, one of them got the flu and her reaction was even worse than mine. She was taken to a nearby hospital where she stayed for the next few weeks.
There is a tendency on the part of the media and of people in general to panic and overreact to health related matters, but there is something to be said for the fear about a flu epidemic. While it may remain one of the most common illnesses around, the flu shouldn’t be taken lightly. It certainly can trigger some unexpected reactions in your body, and in the people around you.
*Published in the UAE's THE NATIONAL on October 9, 2009. |
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