Oink, oink

I HATE coughing. My throat is the type to get irritated easily. I've had to walk out of class just to cough for five minutes without interruption - and interrupting - and without being sick in any way. I seem to recall having to do that in the middle of a sermon, too. I find it incredibly embarassing. I also get a tickle in my throat easily. Now I have the piggy flu cough and let me tell you it is awful. It is loud, it is powerful, it lingers, it hurts, it makes itself known in every possible way and our poor neighbours get it double since poor little girl has a cough, too.

This is a miserable disease and a very, very, very stubborn one. Both little girl and I are on three different kinds of medication. Since little girl hadn't had a fever for two days we took a chance and left out one dose of Panadol during the day. This is out of seven doses of varying medicine during one day. And now she had fever again. Not much mind you, but still. The problem with the Panadol is that 7ml of that sticky, sweet stuff is rather a lot for her and she doesn't want to swallow it.

This, incidentally, was what we learnt at the University Hospital on Saturday. The stuff that goes to the child's bum doesn't really work. Even with small babies they've now started to use the stuff that they will then swallov. It works faster and more of the medicine gets to working in the child's system than through, erm, the other way. With bigger children, in other words like little girl, there's a chance that the medicine doesn't even melt in the bum if the child's tummy is hard.

Anyway, back to the stubborness of this disease. What has now happened twice today is that I've overslept and haven't taken my medicine in time and the result is that fever goes up immeaditely. In the morning I was shaking so badly that I had a hard time feeding my child. We took a three hour nap - interrupted by various spouts of violent coughing - and, yes, again my fever was up.

In the comments of my last entry Dora asked what I thought about the flu shot. I know nothing about the reasons why people wouldn't want to take it and therefore this is not an expert opinion. But in our case Husband has been vaccinated and is fine and it is the biggest blessing ever that he is able to take care of us. Little girl was scheduled to have her shot on Friday but that was too late, obviously. I'd take the shot anytime. If there is any way of avoiding this then I'd make sure I'd do that.

All influenzas are nasty but with this one there seem to be more breathing issues than normally. That's what makes this scary. I've never felt that my throat was closing on me but with this influenza I have. Having to call 112 in the middle of the night (1 am) because I felt I ccouldn't breathe was a first for me. The weird - and as such a good thing - was that my oxygene saturation was good. So, basically I felt I was suffocating but I wasn't. The ambulance staff decided to take me to the ER (in Turku) despite the good oxygene saturation level quite simply because I was so obviously fighting for air. The experience of being to the ER was not a good one but I won't go into that now.

Fighting for air is awful, scary and exhausting. Luckily there is medication for it. The drawback is, however, that in my case at least, my heart rate doubled. So, with the fever you're shaking, now your heart is racing and you feel you can't breathe. Add to that a very painful throat so that every time you cough - and you will - it hurts so much you feel like crying. This is swine flu for me. Not fun!

The pain in my throat has subsided now and I can breathe more easily without having to take the medicine. So, today has been a better day. Little girl is coughing and has a runny nose but otherwise she seems her sunny self and has been eating well. The only thing is that she takes antibiotics for her ears and lugns and that tends to be hard on anyone's tummy. That's the case for poor Little girl, too.

Poor Husband, then, had a migrane today so at one point all three Pusas of the household were sleeping, heavily medicated, in different parts of the house. Which brings me to the one part of this disease that is very visible. The house looks like a pigstye. It's swine flu, yes, but seriously, what happened here?