Symptoms?

I have just depressed myself looking for the symptoms of swine flu on the web. Amazingly some of the sites have not been updated since April. What good is that.

But I have a cold or I think it is a cold or perhaps I have swine flu. Part of me would like to believe I have swine flu because I think I will survive this and then I shouldn't have to worry about it when it hits this fall. But probably I don't have swine flu which means I just have a nasty cold that is making me feel paranoid about having the swine flu.

I should never have bought a thermometer. I keep checking my temperature.

So far I have not had a temperature, but I find that the while fever is a symptom of swine flu, one does not always get a fever with the swine flu. And another source listed as the top two symptoms: fever and sudden cough. The latter is what I had and still have: a sudden cough, though I must say it is no longer sudden, since I have had it a week. Now I would call it persistent. It's a horrible sounding cough, deep in the chest.

I got this cough from Hawaii, I am pretty certain. I say this because it sounds exactly like the cough our neighbors had a week or two ago. They went to Hawaii and came back with a cough, and in their case, also fevers.

Fatigue comes with the swine flu. I have certainly had that in spades. One site even lists "depression" as one of the symptoms. I had that already--I mean even before I caught this cough....

What got me started on this swine flu scare was an article in the LA Times saying one might prepare for the more serious complications of the swine flu by getting the pneumonia vaccine (that protects against bacterial forms), and the last couple of times I have been in my medical person mentioned I should get the pneumonia vaccine because I had pneumonia recently and well--you know--I smoke. So Carol called our medical person to see if I could get a the pneumonia vaccine, and she said sure, but was upset to hear that I had not gotten my vaccine for shingles, which she approved my last visit.

I had completely forgotten the shingles.

God this getting old is complicated. My memory is going, so the shingles completely slipped my mind. Jonathan Swift had the shingles; maybe that's why he was so irritable.

So now I have prescriptions for a shingles and a pneumonia shot. But I don't think I should go get them while I still have this cough--whatever it is.

I mean what if I got these shots and what with my immune system weakened I got pneumonia and the shingles at the same time!

I would be fit to be tied.