From the front lines of swine flu, I'd like to report that the most shocking trait of this illness is its speed: How fast children decline from good health to high fever, how fast the flu spreads from child to child -- and how fast I converted from "mother who pooh-poohed the vaccine" to "mother desperate to find it."
Back in mid-October, my view of the H1N1 vaccine put me comfortably among the 39% of Americans opposed to getting it for their kids, based on a Washington Post/ABC News poll.
My children have all their normal shots. But to me, the certainty of a struggle when wrestling them onto the sharp point of another needle, the risk of contracting the illness in the doctor's office, and concerns about possible side effects from the still-mysterious vaccine far outweighed the risk from any flu -- pandemic or otherwise. And besides, the public health campaign to push a vaccine that wasn't readily available only raised my immunity against government health messages.
Why overreact?
Such opposition has been called "psychological reactance," which is the fairly common inclination to pull away when given unsubtle commands. Call me reactant or call me unperceptive, what I was most of all was a mom defending children with chewable vitamins, my Ukrainian grandmother's recipe for garlic-and-dill chicken soup, and what I thought was common sense. Why panic?
Then, overnight, my street was gripped by flu, complete with 105-degree fevers, doctor's visits with kids in face masks and, perhaps worst of all, a feeling of powerlessness among parents. Those first days when children fell so acutely sick packed a psychological wallop: Hand-washing seemed a trifle against an invisible adversary that was rapidly sweeping through our community. The soccer team got it, and seemingly half my daughter's third-grade class got it. Soon, our mostly mid-Atlantic region was being flagged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as having the highest incidence of H1N1.
The vaccine was the only defense. I started to search for it with the zeal of the newly converted. The downside risk of the flu now outweighed the downside risk of the shot.
A tardy visit to the doctor
But by the time we got to the doctor's office, my 8-year-old was feverish and couldn't receive the seasonal shot, which is only for healthy kids, and H1N1 wasn't available anyway. Her sister got the seasonal shot and got sick four days later. To complete the portrait of helplessness, we got prescriptions for Tamiflu but were told that the antiviral was hard to find in children's doses, and that it needed to have been started within a day of getting a fever. We were already a day late.
The flu is behind us now. My children were luckier than many: No all-night vomiting, no febrile hallucinations and no dangerous co-infections. And they've fully recovered. But I'm not sure I've recovered from the experience. I've swapped many a story, including one about a family of 10 that got the vomiting, and several variations of the "one Korean meal per day" defense of garlic and ginger.
The swine flu vaccine, meanwhile, is still difficult to find, even though the CDC said that 30 million doses were available as of Monday. This manufacturing shortage is just another part of the cautionary tale about government being the single health care planner. (I can say that, because I grew up in Canada.)
But despite the bungling, my thought process has radically changed from where it was a month ago. I no longer find "she has swine" to be an amusing phrase used by my 4-year-old to describe anyone who had been absent from preschool. I'm lucky to be watching swine's backside, and my kids' odds of getting H1N1 again have declined substantially, according to the CDC.
But if I were instead watching it rumble toward me -- armed only with hand soap and garlicky chicken soup -- the H1N1 vaccine would be my first line of defense.
Melana Zyla Vickers, a former member of USA TODAY'S editorial board, is at work on a book on mothers and behavioral economics.
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