Don’t Cry for Me, Angelenos

When the director of disease control programs for the L.A. County Department of Health Services said she was crossing her fingers and toes to avoid the flu, I knew there wasn’t a lot that could be done for me.

I called Dr. Shirley Fannin in the midst of an illness that kept me homebound for a week because she probably knows more about the devil influenza than anyone. She said I might not even have the flu. Perhaps I was only suffering flu-like symptoms related to some other opportunistic virus.

But I’m telling you here and now that it was not only the flu, in the dismissable sense, it was the flu of flus, the ultimate flu, the mother of all flus.

When I described my symptoms in detail, even Fannin thought maybe it was what I said it was.

I coughed, I sneezed, I ached and what drove me the craziest of all was that my ears popped. I’d be lying on the couch in a comatose state watching a meeting of the Calabasas City Council on a public access cable channel when, pop!, an explosive sound in my head would jerk me awake.

It was like champagne corks popping, but without the benefit of the bottle’s content.

My ears still pop occasionally, even though I have abandoned televised meetings of the Calabasas Council as my favorite daytime show. I guess I’ve just lost interest in the budgetary aspects of a sound wall along the Ventura Freeway.

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“We tend to call everything in winter the flu,” Fannin said. “The flu hits suddenly and hard. A large number of people are ill at the same time.”

While saying everyone I know has the flu may not qualify as a large number of people, this does: Everyone I know tells me that everyone they know is sick at home with something that sure as hell sounds like the flu. Coughing, aching, sneezing and popping.

One friend of a friend also said everyone he knew had the flu. A friend of my friend’s friend friend’s friend also said all his friends had the flu. If that isn’t a large number of people, I don’t know what is.

My first tentative outing as my flu-like symptoms began to abate was a trip to my barber, Bob Wallis in Woodland Hills. He entertained me by saying he knew of four people who had died of pneumonia caused by the flu. “One of them,” he said, observing my tired old face, “was only 52.”

As I understand it, that’s one way they determine if the flu constitutes an epidemic. It’s called mortality reporting.

They take the number of those who die from pneumonia and divide by two. Or maybe three. Anyhow, if enough people die of pneumonia they figure it’s probably a flu epidemic. In 1918, when 20 million died of the Spanish flu, they didn’t have a formula worked out yet, but with all those bodies lying around, they didn’t need one.

The flu going around this year is Type A(H3N2). The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports that so far it doesn’t seem to have caused an epidemic. The CDC refers to the ailment generally as ILI: influenza-like illness. Later, if you actually die of an ILI, we’ll figure it was, indeed, the flu.

There are three tests for it, according to epidemiologist David Dassey: a smear of nasal secretion, molecular analysis and blood tests. But even they aren’t foolproof. “There is no silver bullet,” he said. “I mean magic bullet,” he added, correcting himself. “A silver bullet is for vampires.”

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“Take it like a man,” my wife said as I lay dying. Well, actually, as I lay whining. That’s another element of the flu: aching, sneezing, coughing, popping and whining.

I called my doctor. He said, “Treat the symptoms.” I could sense the disgust in his voice. People dying everywhere and I’m bugging him on a Sunday because my ears are popping? Come on.

They popped more when I lay down. “Then you just stand there and whine, dear, while I fix a nice lunch,” my wife said. Standing and whining isn’t the same. So I collapsed on the couch. Pop.

The dog Barkley positioned himself in the room and stared at me all during my ILI. He has a way of flattening his face between his paws and rolling his eyes upward to observe what’s going on.

I wrote once about a doggy at his master’s grave. Everyone thought how loyal, how loving, until they caught the dog trying to dig his master up. Then it was how spooky.

I sensed the same kind of disgust in Barkley’s stare that I sensed in my doctor’s voice. Barkley probably felt degraded seeing his owner lying there whimpering like a puppy. Well, to hell with him.

I’ll whine if I want, I’ll whimper if I want, and I’ll moan if I want. But, heeding the medical example of the county’s disease control expert, I’m also crossing my fingers and toes to get well.

Pop.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays, most of the time. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.