Swine flu; the pandemic that’s sweeping the nation.
Junior Ben Cummings originally thought he just had strep.
“I went to the school nurse who then told me to go to a doctor who told me I had swine flu,” Cummings said. “I got the medicine early enough so I wasn’t sick as long.”
The average person has the swine flu for 3-5 days, no longer than the regular flu.
“I was out of school for a week, luckily, some teachers exempted me from work I missed,” senior Lindsey O’Donnell said. “I was in bed the whole time, I couldn’t eat anything. I had horrible headaches and couldn’t move my head.”
O’Donnell found out she had an underlying thyroid condition that made it take longer to recover from swine flu.
“When I had swine flu, I also found out I had Graves,” O’Donnell said. “It’s preventing me from swimming right now.”
Even though he was only sick for a short time Cummings still felt terrible the entire time.
“I felt like I had been hit by a train,” Cummings said. “It was so contagious, I couldn’t leave the house or chill with my friends at all.”
A few precautions you can take to avoid the flu are hand washing, not coughing in your sleeve, and as nurse Lane said, “not breathing in school.”
“Everyone also needs to calm down,” school nurse Christy Lane said. “Swine flu is less severe than regular flu, and it’s not even flu season yet.”
Swine flu is causing a global panic, it’s contagious and people don’t know anything about it.
“I was thinking, ‘can’t people die from this,’ Cummings said.
O’Donnell thought it was the regular flu, but then she kept getting sicker and sicker.
“It was the worst flu I ever had,” O’Donnell said. “It wasn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, but it was still horrible.”
Lane said they usually send about 30 students home a day, 15 of those for flu and 10 for swine flu.
“Those with flu-like illnesses should stay home for at least 24 hours after they no longer have a fever, without medicine,” the Center for Disease Control said in a recent news release. “People may be able to infect others up to seven days after getting sick.”