Loading ...For the record, I didn’t forget to write the rest of my parenting article. I just happened to catch that weird flu thing that has been going around. I suppose […]
Original post: Sick
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Yay, how delicious! More details please, tell us what the consistency of the puke was like. Was it solid? To liquid? Did it contain identifiable semi-digested food?
How yummy!
Scatological jokes aside, I hope you get better and start ranting again. Because I’m thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat bored.
LOLOL MAYBE HER PUKE IS NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT
Only if she serves it for dinner after the little brats have been nagging her to cook.
It should be “you’re” not “your” in “Your welcome.”
Geez, she’s sick, can’t you at least wait until she’s healthy to pick on her?
V is sick a lot.
AJ: Nope. I like to kick people when they are down.
But she fixed it.
I used to get sick every winter. This year I’m the only one in my office who did not get sick… my secret? I’ve been jogging 3 mi/day for the past 4 months.
And I’ve been on plains where the “sickest” people sat next to me, not even covering their mouths while they coughed or sneezed - yet I seem to have found the perfect medicine.
Check out my inspiration http://www.runnersworld.com/article/0,7120,s6-243-293–12364-0,00.html
Matthew: I’ve changed my mind. I like your style. You see your opportunity and you take it. I can respect that.
Not to kick when you’re down, but I had a couple of clients tell me that the damn thing hangs on for 2-3 weeks. May the person who infected you be sentenced to reading self serving mommy blogs for eternity.
Get well!
Maybe it’s intercontinental flu? My housemate slash co-worker was sick for couple of weeks. Among with a quarter of my co-workers. Got yesterday evening the same. It started so rapidly. In couple of hours I had fever and was not able to talk anymore.
…just in case I have to come to work to day, since tomorrow is my last day and I need to finish all my work and clear out my desk.
Although instead of puking my lungs out, I have a dry cough. With occasional surprises.
Be oh so careful with this particular (and very contagious) flu. It kicks back!
Once you begin to feel close to normal, wait another day before resuming normal activity. If you are not fully recovered, it will relapse and the second time is even worse than the first because your body is weakened. Been there, done that, and it is a real bitch.
Karma is a bitch ain’t it VA?
Xin you stole what I was gonna say!
Instead of whining she should get vaccinated every winter. But then again, who am I to criticize? I’ve always been to lazy to get that damn shot.
Flu Vaccines are great if you are a nurse, infant, or elderly. But in the long run, if people like V get vaccinated it just opens up the possibility of a flu season where they miss guess the vaccine, and then the flu wipes out a quarter of the country cause nobody has any immunity to any flu viruses. So for people like V, getting the vaccine saves you from a few sick days at a cost of not having an immune system that is able to fight off other illnesses…
They tried to vaccinate me at work this year as an “employee benefit,” although secretly they just don’t want us to take sick time, (which they have to pay us for,) while dieing is free, (at least for them.) I told the person that was administering the shots that I “had a cold” that day, and they didn’t give me one.
But I’m beginning to sound like the General in Clockwork Orange, so I’m going to shut up now…
@ Hogarth — LOL
@ Matthew — I read that this year’s flu vaccine wasn’t strong enough to combat the virus. I don’t know what the companies and scientists are doing lately, but they seem to be failing miserably in regards to doing their work well.
@ 16 - even if they misguess the flu vaccine, taking the vaccine doesn’t make you any more susceptible to the flu than someone who didn’t get the vaccine. a vaccine doesn’t “cost” you an immune system that is able to fight off other illnesses - that doesn’t make any sense at all. all it does is raise antibodies against whatever you are injecting them with.
@18: If you took people that normally didn’t get the vaccine, and gave them it this year, and the vaccine was wrong, then yes, it wouldn’t “cost” those people anything. However, my point is that long term, getting the flu every so often makes your body more able to fight new ones, where as getting the vaccine does not teach your body anything, (other than how to fight a very specific type of flu virus, that will probably never be around in exactly the same form anyways.)
Over the long term your body learns how to fight the flu a lot better if it has done it before, and so if you take two otherwise identical 40 year olds, one who got the flu every year, and one who got the vaccine every year, and then have a wrong guess in the vaccine during a bad season, the one that got the vaccine every year is much more likely to die than the one that didn’t. And yes, die:
1918: “Spanish flu” killed 600,000 people in the US (~3% of the population,) mainly the young, (the older people got sick, but didn’t die because they seemed to have resistance to it.)
1957: “Asian flu” killed 70,000 in the US
1969: “Hong Kong flu” killed 33,000 in the US.
None of this is to say that vaccines against polio and things like that are bad: We wiped those diseases completely out, and that is a good thing. But unless we plan on vaccinating all the birds and mammals on this planet against every possible strain of flu, the flu is going to continue to be around for a long time to come.
Matthew, I don’t think you understand how the flu vaccine works. The flu in general changes a bit every year, so scientists try to guess what antigens will be present in the virus that stimulate the immune response. They take these antigens, removing virulence, and make a vaccine out of it, so your body mounts an immune response to these parts of the flu virus. Then, you will have memory immune cells that will kick into action if you are exposed to the virus and clear it before you get any symptoms. These memory cells are also present if you had gotten sick with the flu the firt time - that’s why you don’t get the same flu 2x in a row in the same year.
the spanish flu, asian flu, etc came about because in those cases the flu virus mutated a lot, and so they were totally new viruses essentially. whether someone had taken a vaccine or not would have not made a difference in the outcome.
you’re right - we will never get rid of the flu. but that isn’t the point. its to protect people from getting sick, especially the immune-compromised (including the elderly). however, if people like V want to get it, no harm done. their immune system will be just fine if scientists had misguessed the virus - they’ll just be sick for a few days is all.
…unless she has a compromised immune system, of course!
It’s actually quite interesting to read. It seems it’s somehow rather nasty one. What interests me is I never take any medicine, vaccines or other chemical shite unless I really have to, but I’m very rarely sick.
And if I am sick, I get a bit tired, is all.
This one knocked me out for almost three days straight. Most of my friends are shivering at the moment. I can now stay up with only one woolen shirt on, so I feel a bit better. I can’t recall a time I had it this bad.
If it is as bad on the other side of the ocean it makes me wonder if it is related. And how. And why.
YOU HAVE AIDS.
No it’s sorry GRANDMA, you have AIDS.
Those memory cells are not as strong if you get the vaccine as if you get the real flu. Either way they are strong enough to protect you from this year’s flu, but if you get strong memory cells you build protection not just against the flu going around right now, but also to a couple of the very similar strains to it as well. And that is why* the Spanish flu killed so many young people, but not the old: It wasn’t a completely new strain, it was very similar to a strain that went around in the 1870s or so, (that wasn’t nearly as fatal.) Note it wasn’t the same strain as the 1870s one, so if you’d gotten a vaccine for the 1870s one it wouldn’t help in 1918, but it was similar enough that the people that got it and built good strong memory cells from it wouldn’t get as sick from the 1918 one. Also, the named flus weren’t special because they were completely new mutations, those flus were special because they were more fatal than others. Completely new mutations come around a lot, but most of them aren’t very strong and don’t kill us.
*Their is another reason Spanish flu was very fatal for young people, and that was because young people, (mainly men,) were living in trenches in close contact with each other while eating bad food and with poor hygiene while under stress and gunfire: also known as world war one. But even accounting for that, it still killed more than it’s share of young people.
You are right that the memory cells from a vaccine aren’t as strong as if you actually got the illness, because vaccines usually just contain surface antigens. however, i believe (i could be mistaken) if you take two people who are exposed to the virus, one who had the vaccine and one who didn’t, the one who didn’t would get sick and build immunity whereas the one who did get the vaccine wouldn’t get nearly as sick but should also build the same immunity. The reason for this is they are still both being exposed to the full virus so can raise antibodies, but its cleared in the person who was immunized before they got the bad symptoms. The end result is they both have the same amount of protection from subsequent exposures, yet one person didn’t get the full flu (or sick at all). As a note, I could be wrong, but it seems that is how it works.
As for the Spanish Flu, it is believed to be a mutated strain that previously only infected birds, and the mutations made it a particularly virulent strain. You are right that the named viruses are named because of the pandemics they cause. However, the reason that so many young people died is believed by many scientists to be because this particular strain overstimulated the immune system to produce a “cytokine storm.” It is the cytokine storm that destroyed lung tissue in people, causing their death. The virus can only overstimulate a healthy immune system, so children and elderly were less susceptible to this overactivation of inflammation because their immune systems were not as hearty as the young people. That is the reason so many young people were affected - not because they were being exposed to a virus they had no previous immunity for. Besides, flu vaccines were first developed in the 1940’s, so they had nothing to do with the Spanish Flu.
AIDS
Sami wins.
I’ve cashed in my email updates for the RSS feed.
Tend to life, V.
Kol