Flu vaccine – Stupid is as Stupid does (or doesn’t)

flu-vaccine I had an interesting past two days. On Tuesday, my son had a high fever, sore throat, and chills so my wife kept him home from school and took him to urgent care. He tested negative for flu (more on that in a bit) and strep. They recommended ibuprofen for the fever and lots of water. She gave him ibuprofen and the fever came down. By Tuesday night he was fever free but vomiting. Yesterday, he couldn’t hold down food or water. When he wasn’t vomiting he was dry heaving. I took him back to urgent care. The gave him some meds to try and get his stomach settled down. We were there for about 3 hours and they couldn’t do anything for him. The medical technician was worried about dehydration since he hadn’t drank all day so he had us take him to ER.

Emergency Room (ER) vs. Urgent Care

We got him to ER around 8:00 pm it was a madhouse. I never realized how many people get sick at the same time. They checked him in right away and checked his vitals. Then we waited for a room. Finally they put us in a room at 11:00 pm. The doctor came in about 11:30. He had my son’s blood sugar level checked and tested again for flu. Turns out the hospital uses a flu test that’s 100% accurate. The test used at urgent care is only 70% accurate. It took a little over an hour to get the results back. My son did have the flu, Influenza B which is the same strain they’re vaccinating for this year. In other words, if we’d gotten our son a flu vaccine this year he wouldn’t have gotten the flu.

In the mean time they’d been treating him for nausea. By 1:00 am he could keep water down so we didn’t have to worry about dehydration. The doctor told us he was healthy enough to go home. By the time we finished up it was about 1:30 when we left the hospital.

I’ve never been big on getting a flu vaccine

I’ve never been big on getting flu vaccines for myself or my family. It seems like for awhile the only years I got the flu were the same years I got a flu shot. I have some close relatives that are always going on about how harmful flu shots really are. I never bought into the idea that flu shots were intentionally harmful, but the controversy kind of justified me not getting them. Well, in my mind at least…

Next year we’ll probably get flu vaccines. I didn’t like seeing my son suffer like he had to over the past couple of days. I’m sure I’m not going to like the ER bill when it gets here. And I keep hearing the words from the nurse:

If he’d gotten a flu shot this year, he wouldn’t have the flu right now.

OK. So next year, we’ll probably all (my family) get flu shots. I want to research it some more before I decide for sure. In the mean time, I’m looking into natural ways to boost our immune systems. That should help us to maybe not get the flu even if we don’t get flu shots. If we do get the flu, maybe it will help make the symptoms less severe. At least I hope. After all, the most important prep is to stay healthy…

Peace out,
porcupine