We’re recovering from Swine flu.

Well, I’ve had worse flu. But I have never had tonsillitis ( secondary) before. On Saturday morning it was so bad I couldn’t even swallow my own saliva for about 12 hours and I had to go to an emergency clinic – I looked so ill they didn’t make me wait more than 5 minutes either- I’m now on the most vile tasting liquid antibiotics. But at least a mouthful of cold water doesn’t feel like I’m swallowing broken glass.

One thing I’ve noticed is that recovery from Swine flu isn’t a nice simple ’slowly getting better’ process. All three of us suffering in the house have had phases where we get better, but the next day our temperature is up again and we have to go back to bed. Mr Mathilda is currently pretty unwell and in bed, possibly because it didn’t occur to him that he needed to eat for the past couple of days (when he was better and I was in bed- men).

He never gets sick, which is the  main reason I know its flu and not me being paranoid. If he’s in bed with a fever and aches its a real illness. So far the only uninfected family member is the girl. A small part of me hopes she’ll catch it so it will be one less thing to worry about in case it turns nastier later in the season- but its made us all pretty miserable so I’m just happy she’s well right now. At the moment I’m okay for light housework but my muscles and joints just ache terribly and  get dizzy and weak (this is five days in-started on Wednesday, now its Monday). I don’t think he’ll be back at work for the rest of the week. The boy is still coughing.

And where did we catch it from? We caught it off the kids next door. I am pretty pissed at their mum, she knew the kids had been ill recently but she still let them come around and didn’t warn me. Which was particularly irresponsible because both my husband and I are in high risk groups (we get a seasonal flu jab) – thanks honey.

One thing I’m suspicious of is the sudden apparent lack of deaths from it in the news. One week there were over 100,000 infections, but only a couple of deaths mentioned- which seems bizarrely low compared to everywhere else. One thing I also noticed on another news program was how the minister skipped away from the issue of how many healthy people die from normal seasonal flu every year- I guess that’s not something they want the public to get panicky over.

Anyway- on the bright side- what with the boy being sick and then us, I haven’t  really eaten anything much in the past ten days and I appear to have lost about 7 lbs.