Monday, March 3, 2014

Family Flu

This is not a current scrapbook page 
(there are no current scrapbook pages!) 

Unfortunately, the Blackham household did not escape flu season this year. I was just thinking back on our family flu, and remembered this scrapbook page and looked it up. I thought I would share it here. Cute little Keaton ... looks a lot like Colton!

This season ... I was the first to get hit. It was a couple weeks before Christmas. Day 1, I just felt like it was a cold. I still tried to get my exercise in, but I was dragging. The next couple days I just lay in bed all day. I never really got too bad as far as fever or chills. I lost my voice. That seems to always affect me when I get the flu. I had a cough, but not the killer sore throat that was the main symptom of the flu that had hit four of us last February (Flu x4). I completely lost my appetite. That has NEVER happened to me before. I just couldn't eat or drink. I was down for a solid seven days. On the final day, the influenza flu turned into the stomach flu. Not that I had anything in my stomach. I don't know that I've ever been so miserable as that day. I lost 10 pounds during this sickness ... I almost would have said it had been worth the sickness if I could have hung onto the weight loss, but it came back on as soon as I recovered.

About a month later (in January), Grayson wasn't feeling well as he came home from work. By evening, he was chilling and miserable! The next morning, he tried to go to work. Tried. You know there is this stereotype that men are big babies when they get sick. Not Gray. He did end up coming home pretty early, crawling into bed and falling asleep. He'd been chilling, so he piled the blankets on. He had taken some medication earlier in the day, but it had worn off. When he finally woke up, he felt hot. I took his temperature and it was over 105°. Yikes! I stripped off the blankets, put some cool cloths on him and had him down some more medication and we got it back down. He did take the next couple of days off, and I never let his medicine run out again (even setting an alarm in the night for the next dose). He recovered, but had a lingering cough for a long time.

Colton missed a few days of school not feeling well last month (in February). I had been worried that he might have one of the flu variations that Gray or I had, but his was pretty mild. No one else got sick, which is amazing (especially as while I was sick I was still on carpool duty, lunch duty, etc.  I tried to wash my hands all the time, I guess I was fairly successful).

I found this chart, and thought it was a handy reference. I think I had the seasonal flu, Gray had H1N1 and Colton just had a cold. We never got around to going to a doctor. At the times both Gray and I were really bad, the last place we would have wanted to be was in a waiting room! It just seems there isn't much you can do for the flu except wait it out. 

I remember 2005 was a bad flu year. I'd just had baby Colton, when several members of the family came down with the flu. Including Colton, who was just seven days old. He ended up at Primary Children's for a few days. The scrapbook page is dated 2006, so apparently we got hit that year too. I don't have distinct memories of any other year except Feb2013 (I linked to it above). I'm usually quite healthy ... and yet I think I succumbed each of these aforementioned times. No fair! But hopefully, that's it for "flu" this season!

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