All that coughin’ and sneezin’ mean it’s cold/flu season
This is the season of the flu, of the attack of H3N2, and, as a result, no one is paying much attention to the common cold, which is what I have at this very moment.
It is only a cosmic sense of duty that has brought me sneezing and whining to my computer to say something on behalf of that which has me in its dismal grip. What is attacking us on all fronts is not just a cold. The term is too dismissive, too weak, too faint.
This is a pathology with the strength to cause strong men to whimper like hungry dogs and to plead for relief from the miasma that has created their misery.
While not as serious as, say, coal miner’s lung, the cold is, nonetheless, a devastating viral giant that has infected everyone I know with sore throats, headaches, coughs, laryngitis and, according to my friend Shortcut Bernstein, loss of hair.
“It’s a fact,” he said to me one day over the phone. “When you sneeze and cough too much you kill hair follicles. I read it in People magazine.”
“I’m too sick for this,” I said, coughing slightly and feeling my chest tighten. Even without a cold, talking to Shortcut is difficult. He collects knowledge without meaning.
“You’re sick,” he said, deliberately coughing louder than I had coughed, “I’m the one who’s sick! But I’m trying not to cough or sneeze.”
It’s a Washington state cold, developed when I was spending Thanksgiving up there. It was in a kind of backwater place without the benefits of modern medical science. Incense and leeches are still considered valuable devices for curing everything from ringworm to schizophrenia. When my throat began feeling sore, I left immediately, before they could let the leeches out of their jar. I hate the little suckers.
Shortcut Bernstein is suspicious that the sudden presence of the cold, for which there is no preemptive inoculation, could be an effort by foreign terrorists to paralyze L.A., but I don’t think so. When they want to do us in, they’ll simply drop a mattress in the fast lane of every freeway, and we’ll dissolve in chaos.
The flu is something else. We are being warned by everyone but the local butcher to get a flu shot or face the possibility of death or, even worse, being terribly ill at home and forced to watch daytime TV. Too much Oprah and Judge Judy can cause irreversible brain damage in less than a week.
The only drawback to a flu shot is that it might not do us any good. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in urging everyone to be vaccinated, added in almost a whisper that the inoculations may not work too well against H3N2. That is not a relative of the robot R2D2 but a strain of influenza that is worse than most.
According to news reports, this year’s vaccine is aimed at preventing one type of H3N2 flu but not necessarily the strain that is considered to be more dangerous. You’ll go whistling through life protected against the milder flu while the more virulent strain is waiting around the next corner to jump on your back and kick out your lungs.
When I had my flu shot, I asked the woman who gave it to me if it covered H3N2. She thought it was some sort of new sexually transmitted disease for which there was not yet a common name and said, “Heavens, no!” while backing out of the room. When I told her what it was, she breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Oh, I don’t get the flu. I’m a Libra.” Oh. Right.
In Topanga, we never used to get colds and flu. Mostly we suffered from hallucinations caused by smoking bad cigarettes and viewing too much modern art. But then we started letting outsiders in and they brought with them devastating diseases like colds, flu and the tendency to wear polyester running suits.
We were like the tribe of Nukak-Maku Indians in southeast Colombia that were doing just fine running around naked and eating lizards until they wandered out of the jungle one day and into civilization. Now they are dying, not of bad lizard meat but of contagious diseases. An intrusion of what we call civilization did that for the American Indians too, when us civilized guys came tromping in. They gave us corn and we gave them syphilis.
Well, that’s about all the good news I can pass on today, being in a state of mental and physical dishabille. I’m going to crawl back to the couch now and read and whine, or watch TV and whine, although I will avoid Oprah and Judge Judy. I only wish I’d been born a Libra. This never would have happened.
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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.
