Living Large In Our Little House

Flu Vaccine

I awoke one day last week­end with pos­si­bly the worst headache I’ve ever had in my life, and Tylenol wasn’t help­ing, so by mid-day I was afraid I might have come down with the H1N1 flu. It is ram­pant in the Ozarks right now and schools through­out the region are closing.

Luckily, the headache finally sub­sided when my hus­band finally brought me my sinus med­ica­tions and I was able to down some.

Keeping germs con­fined to one per­son is pretty tough in The Little House, that’s why I still insist we both take the flu shot. We got into the habit when I was car­ing for my elderly mother, who had a chronic lung dis­ease, and we’ve con­tin­ued tak­ing it to keep our immune sys­tems strong.

I might be a lit­tle more para­noid over the flu than the aver­age person.

The deadly effects of the dis­ease was all too real for my fam­ily as my father, who was the youngest of 13 chil­dren, lost a major­ity of his older sib­lings to the Spanish flu pan­demic in 1918.

They too lived in a very small, 2-room house in rural Clarksville, Arkansas.

My dad with my brother, Steve. Fortunately, he never saw a pan­demic as his par­ents had

My dad wasn’t born yet, but the fact that he had never met many of his broth­ers and sis­ters was some­thing he car­ried with him through­out his life, and of course, was a story passed through the gen­er­a­tions in our family.

To this day when I hear some­one pooh-pooh the immu­niza­tion for ward­ing off the flu, I think of my poor grand­mother and what a dev­as­tat­ing loss it must have been to watch so many of her chil­dren die, know­ing there was noth­ing they could have done to pre­vent it. I won­der what she would say to peo­ple who now have the oppor­tu­nity to fight the virus before they even fall ill, but take that lux­ury so casually.

Our doc­tor finally got in the reg­u­lar sea­sonal flu shot this week, and we’ll both be head­ing in as soon as we can get into town.

The details sur­round­ing the H1N1 around here are sketchy, our doctor’s office could only say that the health depart­ment would be the only one receiv­ing it and they didn’t know when.

When I was cov­er­ing school dis­tricts and health issues for local news­pa­pers, I learned a lot about the myth sur­round­ing the flu shot.

Doctors, health offi­cials, the CDC, and nurses all told me that it is absolutely false that the flu can be con­tracted by tak­ing the shot.

The reg­u­lar, sea­sonal flu shot is a dead virus, mean­ing it can­not spread the virus once inside the body. If you’ve become sick after tak­ing a flu shot it is either because a). You had come in con­tact with the virus before and you would have fell ill any­way, or b). You had some sort of aller­gic reaction.

Since my hus­band and I have started tak­ing the flu shot (maybe for a decade), we haven’t had a major bought with the flu.

A friend at book club gave me some other com­mon sense meth­ods of ward­ing off colds and the flu that she got from a rel­a­tive who is a doc­tor. I thought I would pass them along, as there is a cou­ple on the list that I didn’t know:

• Wash your hands thor­oughly and often.
• Do not touch your face, espe­cially your eyes, mouth and nose while out in pub­lic. I also carry hand san­i­tizer while out and use it fre­quently and use the cart san­i­tizer pro­vided at the gro­cery store.
• Gargle twice a day with warm salt water or Listerine. H1N1 takes 2–3 days after ini­tial infec­tion in the throat/nasal cav­ity to pro­lif­er­ate and show symp­toms. This sim­ple, inex­pen­sive and pow­er­ful pre­ven­ta­tive method kills the germs and pro­hibits proliferation.
• Drink as many warm liq­uids as you can. Drinking warm liq­uids has the same effect as gar­gling, by wash­ing the germs into the stom­ach where they will not survive.
• Clean your nos­trils at least once every day with warm salt water. Blowing the nose hard once a day and swab­bing both nos­trils with cot­ton buds dipped in warm salt water is very effec­tive in bring­ing down viral population.
• Boost your nat­ural immu­nity with foods that are rich in Vitamin C, or if you take Vitamin C tablets, make sure that is also has Zinc/biofavonoids to boost absorption.

Even in our Little House, when one of us has got­ten a bug, we have been able to keep it from get­ting bad, or keep the other from get­ting it by:

–Immediately, upon the first sign of a scratchy throat, we begin down­ing Vitamin

C, Zinc and Echinacea (I haven’t had a cold in 2 years due to this method).
–Covering our mouths and noses with tis­sue when we cough or sneeze and then

imme­di­ately wash­ing or dis­in­fect­ing our hands before touch­ing anything.

–Wiping down the house with dis­in­fec­tant a cou­ple of times a day, includ­ing door-     knobs, water faucet han­dles, phones, etc.

–Using sep­a­rate hand towels.

–Immediately chang­ing the tooth­brushes after the fever sub­sides, to help pre­vent re-infection.

I heard a news broad­cast the other day even rec­om­mend­ing that the sick per­son wear a face­mask in the house. We haven’t gone there just yet, but one never knows!

Hopefully, the pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures will keep us well in The Little House this year, and I hope they will help all of you too!

Do you have any tried and true meth­ods of stay­ing healthy dur­ing the cold and flu season?