Oh boy, the Swine Flu Story™.So, if you’re a young kid, you probably missed out on that time when everybody and their grandma got swine flu. A friend of mine was no different. She got it, she was sick for a week or two and then recovered, thank god. She was having a party a couple days later and a ton of us went. I was scared I wouldn’t get to go because I was recovering from some pretty intense food poisoning (don’t eat expired Caesar Salad Kits, kids). But I felt fine the day before, so I asked my friend Britt to pick me up and we went. We shared pizza, we drank, we watched bad movies. It was a good time… and then one of the guys there almost threw up on me. I’m talking he puked exactly where my body was and if I didn’t have catlike reflexes at the sound of gagging, I would have been puked on. He threw up a couple more times throughout the night and nobody questioned it. He was drunk af. I went home the next day and around mid-afternoon, I didn’t feel so good. I threw up. I’d never thrown up from being drunk before and I didn’t even hardly drink. I had one rum and coke and then ate a whole meal. Your boy don’t drink. So when I puked I thought “Hm, maybe it’s still the food poisoning.”…and then I threw up again less than an hour later. And again 20 minutes after that, and again …and again. I wobbled out to the living room and I looked at my mom and said “Uhhh, I think I need to go to the hospital.” and she said “Shut up, I’m watching baseball”. I went back to bed. I kept puking. A few days went by. My life was a weird blur of taking sips of Gatorade left by my bedside, fever dreams, sweat, puke, and restless sleep. I don’t know how much time passed, but I remember my mom trying to tug me out of my bed.She took me to the hospital. When they tried to take my blood, they couldn’t find my veins. I remember watching the nurse pinch and slap my arm to try and get it to flare up. I remember watching her snap a rubber band against my inner elbow. I remember her cursing under her breath, sticking me with needles over and over while my mom and a doctor talked about how if she had waited even one more day, I would have been in critical condition. They gave me four bags of fluids. My fever killed the virus. I was sent home that afternoon, bleary and weird, but cognizant for the first time in a week. Later my mom told me she took me to the hospital because she looked in on me at 6 AM before she went to work and I was lying in a strange position. When she came home at 4 PM, she looked at me and I was still in that same position. I don’t know how it took her a week and a half to put together that something was wrong. I had swine flu. I nearly died. It was 2009, Black Eyed Peas’ “I Got A Feelin’” was playing on the radio in the car. It was a weird time.I made a YouTube video in my post-fever delirium of me lip syncing into a Sprite bottle that cannot be seen by mortal eyes.
