Swine Flu Blues

I worked a night shift last Sunday, and during the shift my partner and I were paged to help with a Life Flight because the Cedar City Airport is shut down for the whole month because it is having its runways repaved. Because they were not able to fly, the Life Flight crew opted to drive to Cedar from St. George and use one of our ambulances to take the patient to Dixie Regional for further care. My partner and I went to the ICU to help move the patient over to the ambulance equipment and then turned the patient over to Life Flight for the transfer.
At about 5PM on Tuesday evening, my supervisor from work called to let me know that he had just received word that the patient was a confirmed Swine Flu patient, and because of the exposure, I needed to get to work med as soon as possible to be evaluated and to start Tamiflu treatment as a precaution.
Tamiflu is a class C drug for pregnancy. This just means that no tests have been conducted on pregnant humans, however in tests on pregnant animals, Tamiflu has created complications either with the fetus or the pregnancy. Class A is considered safe. So, with all of that, I've decided not to take the Tamiflu for now, unless I actually start to have flu symptoms. Swine flu is thought to have a 5-7 day incubation period, and I'm on day 7 now. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
But one thing that is probably more interesting, in the context of how serious these pandemic type flu viruses have the potential of being, is how many people I may have exposed, just in the time before I knew I had been exposed. They are predicting that during the flu season, the mild strain of Swine Flu will mutate and have a possible 50% mortality rate, so think about how scary this could be.
On Monday, I stayed home most of the day but probably most important to me, was that this was the day I would have exposed my family to the virus. Later that night, I went to a summer party with the Cedar Fire Department. Cedar City only has one fire department, so think about the implication that one infected person could potentially have the ability to disable that entire entity in a community.
Tuesday morning, I had a twenty seven week appointment with my OB. While sitting in the waiting room, I could have exposed several more pregnant women, as well as Dr. Gatherum and three of his office staff. I found out that evening about the exposure, but this is only day two. Most people don't have the luxury of being told when and where they might have been exposed, and with such a long incubation period, most people wouldn't be able to track their exposure.
I'm not going to go through the rest of the days of the week, but I did have a lot of things scheduled last week and would have possibly exposed a long list of people before even showing any symptoms. Kind of scary to think about, don't you think?