I recommend the seasonal flu — but please allow me to explain.
About a week ago, I felt suddenly rundown and weak. I just wanted to lie down.
I thought nothing of it at the time. My family is facing some difficulties at the moment, difficulties we all must face now and again — and all of us are getting beat down.
But it wasn’t just fatigue.
Was it the big C, I wondered?
Nope.
I’d never tested positive for having COVID-19. Did that dreaded virus finally find a way to feast on my blessed good health?
Nope.
It turned out to be just a regular flu — but there was nothing regular about it.
A particularly nasty and highly contagious bug that’s spreading rapidly around my region, it turned out to be the worst case of flu I ever recall having in my life.
With the intense national — and global — focus on a deadly “novel coronavirus” these past two years, it’s easy to forget how deadly the regular flu is.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has always had a hard time pinning down the exact numbers, the flu has been killing anywhere from 17,000-97,000 Americans every year since 2012.
Healthline says the flu has caused at least “3.5 million flu illnesses, 34,000 hospitalizations, and 2,000 deaths” in the United States this season.
And I was among its victims.
I went to the emergency room to make sure it was the bug causing my issues, and that my heart and fundamentals were sound — and I am very lucky they were (and are).
Then, I returned home and commenced immediately lying in the same spot without moving — no food, nothing — for the next four days.
My teeth itched. I felt like a piano was sitting on my chest. The nausea would not relent.
It was one of the best weeks of my life.
It’s a challenge all too common in affluent America: You can easily lose sight of how good you have it until you are reminded how bad things can get.
I recall filling my truck up for $40 a tank not long ago — and now, it costs $70 a tank.
All I can think of as I stand there pumping gas is how hard I worked the prior few years and how I was able put a nice little buffer in my savings account to prepare for a rainy day.
Now, I think of the 1% return my savings account is paying against the 8.4% inflation rate from last month — and the 9.6% rate it could be this month — and I realize how much I took for granted the low-low inflation rate we’ve been enjoying for several decades.
Having your good health taken from you suddenly — but temporarily in my case, thankfully — makes me want to focus my energy on important matters, not trivial ones.
From now on, I do not want to waste one fraction of a single second discussing politics on social media, but I do want to spend as much time as possible with my mom and dad, as long as we have them to enjoy.
Every time I see them now — and I wasn’t able to do so at all the past week — I ask them a new question about their lives and other family members.
They are a fountain of wisdom, and I want to capture as much of their experience and knowledge as I can while they are still able to share it.
And now you know why I recommend the seasonal flu!
Tom Purcell is an author and humor columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Email him at tom@tompurcell.com. Copyright 2022 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
