It's here!

I've spent the past six months with my head buried firmly in the sand, insisting that all this swine flu silliness was just going to blow over, that it's exactly like any flu, really not a big deal. Totally shrugged off any discussion of it. I figured it was going to be a total nothing. If we had to deal with anything at the hospital, I imagined it would just be a steady stream of worried well trying to stockpile antivirals.

But over the past week or so our hospital has been pretty firmly whomped with a steady trickle of very early and very severe flu cases, and a fair number of them are H1N1.

Now I do have an inexplicable passionate love affair with horror movies, and most especially those of the viral apocalypse variety. Nonetheless, I am not at all excited about the prospect of my first ever year as a doctor being the year we all die of the flu.

(Mostly because I'm just not sure my uterus is up to the task of repopulating the world).

I may have felt a tiny tingle of excitement as I snapped the elastic of my respirator behind my ears and headed down the hallway to see my first verified H1N1 patient. But as we tried to tease out who might have been exposed and how many high risk contacts he had and whether he needed to be admitted and whether he met the criteria for antiviral treatment and whether his one month old baby with a fever and runny nose needed treatment, I just thought oh no.

I may not be getting very much sleep on call this winter.