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You have to look out for the flu, do you hear me? You, and everyone you know. That may or may not mean getting a flu shot - more on that below - but either way, watch for it, cover your mouth, wash your hands, see the doctor... do whatever it takes to contain it. Especially if you are pregnant, or know someone pregnant, or might possibly one of these days sneeze on someone who is pregnant. Because those someones? Their lives - and the lives of their babies - depend on it.
(It is, it seems, my role in this space to harangue and terrify you. Playgrounds will kill your children! Plastics are poisonous! Your uterus CAN FALL RIGHT OUT BETWEEN YOUR LEGS OHMAHGAH. And for that I am sorry. I am also sorry that I have to do it again.)
Let me repeat that: their lives depend on it.
Just ask Aubrey Opdyke.
In a New York Times piece this week, Ms. Opdyke told her story - the story of how the flu virus almost killed her, and how it did, tragically, kill her unborn baby:
"On June 27, Ms. Opdyke... came down with mild flu symptoms.
She finally came home from the hospital three weeks ago.
In the four months she was hospitalized, she spent five weeks in a coma, suffered six collapsed lungs and a near-fatal seizure. High-pressure ventilation blew her up like a molten balloon until “she looked like she weighed 400 pounds,” her husband, Bryan, said, and she has stretch marks from her neck to her ankles. Her muscles and lungs are still so weak that she uses a walker.
While hospitalized, she missed seeing her 4-year-old daughter, Hope, learn to swim and start pre-school.
And, most important, she lost her baby."
Yeah. Because of the flu.
Pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to the flu, not least because their immune systems are preoccupied with the work of protecting the baby within the mother. According to the article, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 100 pregnant women had been in intensive care with swine flu and that 28 had died, and that those numbers are likely a "tiny fraction of what are believed to have been millions of cases in the country."
Millions of cases. The number of which ending in fatalities is unknown.
So what are we to do? Make sure all pregnant women and all persons in regular contact with pregnant women get flu shots? Maybe. But there is, apparently, some uncertainty about how to protect against both regular and so-called swine flu. CBC reported today that there seems to be some preliminary evidence that the flu shot increases risk of contracting H1N1. In which case, what's a concerned expectant mother to do?
If you're pregnant, or living with someone who is pregnant, make sure that you speak with your doctor about how best to protect against any kind of flu. If you're neither pregnant not preggo-adjacent, think about doing this anyway. At the least, pregnant or not, make sure that if you have any flu symptoms you're staying home and laying low and covering your mouth and washing your hands - OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN - and doing everything you can to contain it.
Because the life you save? Might be a mom and baby's.
Catherine Connors blogs at Her Bad Mother and Their Bad Mother and everywhere in between.
