Dr. Paidlove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Flu

Recently, I was victim to a nation-wide epidemic: I came down with the Swine Flu. Before you reach for the anti-viral wipes to scour your eyeballs with lest reading this article gives you the dreaded Swine, let me share a few things I learned.
First off, our health care system sucks. I have health insurance through work, and supposedly this is a real benefit to me. I pay into the system bi-weekly and should, therefore, be able to see a doctor while I am ill. That’s what I was told at the informational meeting, anyway. However, it turns out that’s not really true. I guess because most of my ailments over the years had been minor: colds, rashes, the usual gambit of discomforts that could bloom into medical problems if not tended to, I hadn’t noticed that it had been nearly a decade since I’d seen my primary care physician. Always handed off to a nurse practitioner, I was getting care by proxy. I wasn’t even sure what my doctor looked like at this point – or if he even really continued to exist. Like some sort of Emerald City wizard, his orders and prescriptions came to me, but I never saw the man behind the curtain. So, it was a little bit shocking – though it shouldn’t have been – when my primary care physician told me it would be four days before I could see someone in his office even when I reported symptoms of fever, body ache, and vomiting. I remember in a delirium of daytime cold medicine and acetaminophen feeling the sore rub of getting jipped when my physician’s office recommended that I go to a walk-in clinic because I couldn’t be seen there. Not in the amount of time that was necessary to treat my illness. If my employers and I are going to pay such steep health care costs, then shouldn’t the benefit be that I don’t have to wait in line to see a doctor? Furthermore, shouldn’t I ever be able to see said doctor – in the flesh? Wasn’t this exact same scenario – long waits for care and sub-par service – what all of those ravenous anti-universal-state-health-care (though that’s not even what’s being proposed by the current administration) town hall attendees were so against?
The second eye-opening experience I had was in the actual walk-in clinic itself. Still ripe with fever, my breath had a warm pull to it that felt like illness. My forehead was coated with a thick layer of perspiration that bled into my eyebrows until they were too burdened with flop sweat and let a waterfall of stinging, biting moisture into my already irritated eyes. Constant body aches and chills and a dry nagging cough had me wrapping myself tighter and tighter into a contorted mess as I sat in the waiting room chair. My mailman could have diagnosed me at this point for the symptoms were so obviously all screaming in unison one word: flu. The nurse who weighed me and asked the standard repertoire of questions even looked me in the eye and said, “Oh, honey, that’s some flu you’ve got there.” So, everyone could see I had the flu. Everyone but one person: the doctor who saw me.
“I’ve seen the flu before, and this isn’t it,” were the first words out of his mouth. He proceeded to ask me if I watched a lot of television and if I had heard about the Swine Flu on television. I told him that of course I’d heard of it, and that several people I knew had recently come down with the flu. After some back-and-forth he finally agreed to do me the favor of testing me for the flu. Fifteen minutes later, my test results for H1N1 were positive and I was donning a medical face mask and prescription for Tamiflu. It was reassuring to learn that I wasn’t victim to media suggestion only and suffering from some sort of illness created in my mind, but it was also disheartening to learn that my walk-in clinic doctor was little more than a middle man between me and the care that I needed. I diagnosed myself. I ordered the test. He just granted permission and wrote the prescription for the medicine that I knew I needed.
The pharmacy was a whole different experience. Whereas I’d been getting less-than-optimal medical services up to this point, nothing really expedites the handling of your prescription like a face shrouded in a virtual poster reading, “you don’t want what I’ve got,” and a prescription that proves it. The exact words of the pharmacist upon handing her the prescription were, “Wait. Wait right here.” Less than three minutes later, and fifty dollars lighter, I had my pills and was out the door.
However, the final – and perhaps most shocking thing – that I learned while home sick with the Swine flu was this: it’s not that bad. I mean, it wasn’t exactly how I wanted to spend my Labor Day weekend, and I wasn’t thrilled about using up so much sick time the next week while it worked its way through to completion, but overall it was just a regular flu for me. I was miserable, but there were no horsemen of the apocalypse coming to my bedside warning of end times. In a way, it was almost like a vacation. A chronic non-sleeper, the flu forced my body to surrender – often – to unconsciousness. I caught up on some sleep that I’d been missing. Also, as a workaholic, I was actually shocked when after a few days of being too ill to concentrate on my occupation shifted from mortal dread to respite and calm. I actually started to think about things besides work. This produced an infectious desire for me to get out more, do more besides just set my proverbial nose to the grind stone once feeling better. What started out as a disheartening, cynic-producing journey through the health care system has ended with a most rested, rejuvenated me. For that, I guess I have the flu to thank.