The WTFlu

You have got to be, I thought, reading the news story this afternoon, kidding me.

Apparently a cat in Parker City was diagnosed with H1N1 which was nothing short, according to the reporter, of a cautionary tale for pet owners everywhere. As a pet owner with pets everywhere (or so it feels every night when I come home and am simultaneously meowed at persistently by two cats and gifted with a stuffed animal significantly slobbered upon and duly shaken, by a dog), this was just this side of a mindblower. Apparently animals could get the flu. They could, in turn, give it to their ‘people’, and vice versa.

The smart money, the story read, was on ‘isolating your animals from other people who are sick and if you are sick yourself, you should isolate yourself from your animals’. Bad news for me, again. Short of moving out, on a temporary basis of course, onto the roof of the carport outside my bedroom window, isolating myself from my animals isn’t possible. For another thing, I rely on them when I’m sick. They’re the only ones who can stand me when with every rise in temperature, every throb of the headache, and every shake of the chills makes me cry like a girl (because what can I say, I am a girl) and the last thing I’d want or could stand would be to isolate myself from them.

I guess we’d all have to have the flu together, kind of like my sister, myself, and my dad all had the mumps back in the mid-sixties. I have only vague memories of being bundled into my twin bed, surrounded by balloons and Barbie dolls so it couldn’t have been all bad. We all came out of it OK and my parents didn’t want further children, anyway (although if they had, I’m quite sure playing Florence Nightingale to all of us at once as she did then was enough to change my mom’s mind). So that, honestly, is my ‘plan’ for the flu, being as it seems quite the thing for organizations and individuals to have a ‘plan’ for the flu, at least beyond washing their hands every 1.6 seconds.

Still, I can’t believe it. I would never have thought I could pass a flu to my dog or cat, or vice versa. Ordinarily I’m a fairly articulate person but in all honesty, my only response at the time I read the story and my only response now remains the acronym “WTF?”. I know I’m doing all I can do to prevent the flu, having become a hand-washing zealot of sorts and vowing never, ever, to touch my face (except to wash it, of course, and to add/remove contact lenses although my hand sterilization procedure prior to either is worthy of any surgeon about to perform heart surgery). You can’t be too careful, especially this year when our work-sponsored flu shot clinic was cancelled (no vaccine) and my doctor’s office likewise couldn’t give me a flu shot (no more vaccine).

Both scenarios were a shock, as a flu shot has always been, up to this point, as ubiquitous as, say, a weekly manicure you do yourself because you can’t justify a spa charge even when you have it to spend. I couldn’t understand how in the world we could be so short that we’d be cancelling clinics.

That was before, of course, I read today’s news story and understood it’s the cats and dogs who are also in line for the supply.

Again, the acronym crosses my mind, and I can only hope this year, I successfully avoid the WTFlu.