This article originally appeared on Self Magazine online on November 9, 2018.
On October 19, 2018 I marched my 36-year-old self to the doc and got a flu vaccine for the first time. Before this year, I’d never considered it. But, a lot of things changed this year.
In January 2018, just a few months before, my husband, Charlie, and I both got the flu. We thought we’d ride it out and be back to normal in a week. A week turned into two and we weren’t getting better.
January 27, Day One
I took Charlie to the Emergency Room in the middle of the night. Something was very wrong. Within 15 minutes of bringing him into the ER, he’d been put him in a medically-induced coma. In those 15 minutes, my world came to a screeching halt.
Turns out, this was no longer the flu; this was pneumonia. But Charlie’s body wasn’t content to just have pneumonia. While we’d been curled up on the sofa nursing chicken broth and popsicles, there was a hostile takeover going on inside him. The pneumonia had quietly left him vulnerable, and a strep infection slipped into his bloodstream. It spread rapidly throughout in his body, poisoning every organ until he was septic and his organs were dying one by one.
If we’d waited even a couple more hours, he wouldn’t have survived long enough to get to the hospital.
I wouldn’t wish the following 36 hours on anyone. It all bleeds together in a fog a worry, no sleep, and confusion. Every time a patient would flatline and the doctors were emergency paged, I would start running toward his room, that’s how tentative it was. I remember a tiny hospital room with room for one visitor and a dozen machines hooked up to my husband. Total organ failure. Regular blood transfusions. Septic shock.
A dozen hours in, a doctor told me that I should start to consider funeral arrangements so I “wasn’t blindsided by it.” Charlie was 38 and healthy, up until a few days ago.
We had thought we’d go home that night or the next day, if it was really bad. We were really, really wrong.
January 31
His mom made me go home for a few hours to rest. When I woke up, my back hurt so bad I blacked out when I tried to sit up. A friend took me to Urgent Care. I had pneumonia, too. The pain was my kidneys shutting down. It was only by the grace of adrenaline that I’d stayed upright through the waiting room. The Urgent Care nurse wanted me to go to the hospital but I refused. “We can’t both be in there,” I said. “Someone needs to be ready to bring him home in a couple days.” I was running a high fever and was delusional. Nothing had sunk in yet.
For the next ten days I was barred from seeing Charlie while I ran through a course of antibiotics so the germs I carried wouldn’t kill him. That’s how fragile he was. He was still barely hanging on in a coma. Still in total organ failure and septic shock. Everything started to hit me.
The one person I’d leaned on for more than half my life wasn’t there. I didn’t know if he would be again. Our friends left soup and Gatorade on the porch. I refused to see anyone out of a deep-seated paranoia of sending them to the hospital. I shut the door to the bedroom and slept on the sofa. It felt too strange to be in the bed alone.
February 10
He was still comatose when I got the all-clear to see him. So I sat next to his bed and waited.
The first thing he struggled to say as he was drifting between being awake was, “I love you, too.” Me telling him I loved him in the emergency room two weeks earlier was the last thing he remembered.
The next few weeks in the ICU were slow. He still had the breathing tube in and was hooked up to machines that were forcing his kidneys to work, and a tube down his throat piping “food” into his stomach that looked like a bottle of pancake batter. Charlie hates pancakes.
February was spent in a purgatory of waiting and tiny victories. I gauged his improvement how long the doctors were making plans for his care — 4 hours, 12 hours, 2 days. The longer the plan, the better his odds became.
There was a night that every room around him had a Code Blue. So many people fighting for their lives and a few didn’t make it. I was so sleep deprived and worried I moved a chair to the doorway of his room and sat guard. If anything were roaming the halls looking to take another soul that night, it would have to get through me, first.
I couldn’t tell him just how sick he really was until he was fully out of the woods, didn’t want to cause stress that could hinder progress. It’s scary how quickly these surreal and terrifying things become “normal” when they’re your day to day life. You go into survival mode. I’d be as cheerful and encouraging and determined as I could muster sitting with him all day in the hospital. The second I got home, I’d cry until I fell asleep on the sofa, then get up and go to the hospital and smile for him again.
He lost 40 pounds, nearly all of it muscle. But he was awake and stabilizing. Charlie’s brain had spent so long disconnected from his muscle memory, all the wiring had decayed to the point he was as helpless as a toddler. He had to relearn everything, even the most basic tasks we do without a second thought. How to talk. How to hold a pen. How to feed himself. I knew if I was frustrated watching him struggle, he had to be irate at feeling so trapped in his own body.
He had another surgery to implant a tube through his abdomen into his stomach to “eat,” because his esophagus was so weak he couldn’t swallow without choking.
The next few weeks in ICU focused on getting his constant fever down and continuously draining the pleural effusion (sacs of bacteria-laced fluid) that surrounded his lungs. There was so much of it that he only had half of one lung getting air to his body. His heart rate was terrifyingly high because it had to work overtime to use what little oxygen he had. More surgeries and more tubes sticking out of his frail body.
March
Charlie started physical therapy in the hospital to learn to walk again. Three machines were still attached to his body, a nurse or I would pull them along as he slowly shuffled across the hospital room, and, eventually, around the 3rd floor of the ICU.
He spent another three weeks in a nursing facility for physical therapy once his organs had recovered and worked on their own. A friend made a walker apron out of ridiculous fabric to carry around his crossword puzzles, cell phone, and a stuffed sloth dubbed “Dr. Slotherson, Esq.” that became his mascot. The resident elderly envied his swag.
April
He came home two days before his 39th birthday. His entourage included the stomach tube (along with boxes of nutritional slurry), a walker, a shower chair, and dozens of medications. He’d been hospitalized for 58 days. For most of that first day home, his cat sat in his lap, purring and looking up at him in total adoration.
Summer
Two more months of physical therapy, in-home nurses, and weekly specialist visits. The thousand-yard-stare started to fade. It was another week before he laughed. You don’t notice how frequent those are until they aren’t there. The body internalizes so much trauma but keeps going.
He grew stronger slowly and surely. He grew a beard. He was smug about fitting into smaller pants. We celebrated with ice cream when he made it around the block without a walker. In-home physical therapy made way to outpatient physical therapy once a week. He started back at his job, working from home part-time.
November
Everything about our life looks normal now. You’d never guess a few months ago he almost died. Both of us are back at work full-time like nothing happened. We both wake up in the night sometimes, disoriented and afraid that “normal” life was a dream and he’s still sick. We know that part will take a while to heal. When you’ve lived with uncertainty and fear like that for so long, it’s hard to let go of the paranoia you needed to survive.
While I’d like to tell you what we went through was a complete fluke, it isn’t. In an average flu season, more than 200,000 people are hospitalized. Between 12,000 and 56,000 people will die. Easy numbers to dismiss until it’s someone you love.
The 2017-2018 flu season was particularly terrible for number of cases, age groups targeted, and severity of illness — 710,000 people were hospitalized and the CDC estimates that more than 80,000 died. Only half were considered the typical “elderly” at-risk demographic. The rest were like us, young, healthy.
We were lucky.
Also worth noting that a record low number of adults got the flu shot last year. Coincidence?
The Centers for Disease Control are tracking a flu season already in progress.
So, let’s clear up a few things:
- No, a flu shot doesn’t guarantee you won’t get the flu. But it won’t be as sick if you do. Each year, the vaccine is produced based on predictive models for which strain of influenza will be the worst that season. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they don’t. But the vaccine still helps.
- No, a flu shot won’t make you sick with the flu. The flu shot contains a dead virus. Your arm might be sore at the injection site, and you might have a low fever for a day. Minor inconvenience compared to the flu itself.
- No, you’re not limited to a flu shot. This year, the nasal vaccine is back after being off the market for two years for improvements. It’s more effective than it used to be, on par with the shot. The flu virus in the nasal spray is attenuated, which means it is technically still “live” but so watered down that, unless you are already immunocompromised, you won’t get the flu. (And if you’re that immunocompromised, you shouldn’t be getting the nasal spray vaccine anyway.)
- YES, talk to your doctor about these things and don’t just take the word of a stranger on the internet.
This year, going around without a flu vaccine isn’t an option for me.
Beyond protecting yourself, getting a flu shot is a big deal for community (or herd) immunity. There are tens of thousands of people who can’t get vaccines because of weakened immune systems from diabetes, cancer, or HIV/AIDS. There are babies who are too young to be vaccinated. Getting vaccinated protects everyone by giving germs fewer hosts. Fewer hosts for an illness means outbreaks become less severe, and eventually, the disease dies out. Think of it as doing everyone else a solid while waging war on some microbes.
But I want people to know that it isn’t just about “get a flu shot so you don’t die.” For me it’s “if you won’t get a flu shot for yourself, at least do it for someone who loves you.” Do it for the people who would sit by your bedside. Do it for those whose lives wouldn’t be the same without you.
If I’m honest, I got vaccinated because I don’t ever want to repeat this year again. And I wanted to do my part so that, just maybe, someone else wouldn’t have to go through it, either. Charlie and I started tweeting about it, with the hashtag #GetAFluShot and we’ve been overwhelmed by the responses. Dozens of people who’d never bothered with a flu vaccine before went and got one because of us. I’d like to think at least one of those won’t be in the hospital this year because of that choice.
We were lucky. Eighty thousand people last year weren’t.
Don’t bet on luck. Do your part to increase your odds of staying healthy, beating the flu, and protecting others. Make your own luck this year and get the flu vaccine.