Everyone I Know Is Sick
Good news. I have discovered what scurrilous disease has sent so many of us crashing into our sickbeds wishing we were dead.
We know it isn’t a flu epidemic because the L.A. County Health Services Department assures us that fewer of us are dying from respiratory diseases this year than last year, which is one way they determine flu’s cheerless impact. But, still, we are sick of something and if not influenza, what? I have the answer. We’ve got the Sweating Sickness.
I reach this conclusion through Volume 11 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and through a series of logical assumptions based on a mild headache that progressed through a drenching perspiration to giddiness and ended, more or less, on the brink of what a friend calls the final twitch. It was exactly that way in England in 1485 when it was first diagnosed as the Sweating Sickness (later the English Sweat) and in France two centuries later when it became known as the Picardy Sweat.
In both cases, they were certain the disease was not influenza, but they didn’t know what it was, other than an ailment that seemed to be more prevalent among the rich and possibly rooted in “dirt and filth.” If you were going to die, you died within 18 hours. If you survived that long, the likelihood was you would recover. Medicine hasn’t changed much in the last 400 years.
What we have in L.A. at the moment, while not confined to the wealthy, is also not a flu epidemic. Part of it is the flu, but the rest is “related symptoms.” In effect, it’s something, but we don’t know exactly what. So why not the L.A. Sweat?
My interest in the subject is personal. I have been a victim of the disease for about the past week although I am neither rich nor filthy. Sometimes I get a little gamy when I work out on the treadmill, but I shower as quickly as possible to avoid offending. Wealth, as I said, is not my problem and apparently no longer a consideration of the infectious agents responsible for the Sweating Sickness, society having taken a more egalitarian cant in the past four centuries. Severe illness is now communicable across class lines.
At the first signs of my ailment I naturally assumed it was epidemic flu. My assumption was based on the fact that everyone I knew had the same thing, and everyone they knew had it too. My friend Dan Seymour, the actor, said he knew 35 people who had it, and my other friend Nigel Richards Brown, the financier, said he knew 17 with the same dreary symptoms.
I also discussed it with a television producer who simply said, “My God, it’s like the plague.” I took that to mean he knew dozens who had it. Producers don’t like to be pinned down.
When the disease first struck, I turned with trusting heart to my doctor, a busy man with an evil sense of humor who said don’t worry about it, drink a lot of water, go to bed and call if you get pneumonia. The implication was if I did not drink a lot of water and go to bed, I would surely die. In the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-19, 20 million of us did die. Health departments probably didn’t know it was the flu then either until they began counting the dead and realized the inanity of saying 20 million people had died of related symptoms.
I began researching the disease when Dr. Laurene Mascola of the L.A. County Health Services Department assured me there was no influenza epidemic. She is deputy chief of the acute communicable disease control unit and ought to know.
There is no way, she said, to actually count how many have the flu since it is not a reportable disease like syphilis. She said she was sorry I was personally ill, but this is simply the season when people get sick of “concurrent diseases.”
“Every winter,” she said, “people come down with something.”
We don’t know how many people come down with something because they come down with it at home and stay there. That’s another thing. Cold, miserable weather keeps everyone indoors, and when they socialize, they tend to distribute their concurrent diseases to greater numbers of friends at the same time. That’s why we’re all more likely to come down with whatever we’re going to come down with in the winter. Makes sense to me.
If more of us would only die from flu-like symptoms the health department would get a better fix on whether or not we have a flu epidemic by the simple expedient of counting bodies. Death from a respiratory disease does not confuse them. And I’m sure it won’t confuse you.
