When Pigs Get Personal

Mom always told me, or rather repeatedly told me before I left, “Don't get sick your first month of college!” I always had a knack for doing exactly what my mom did not want me to, so it was no surprise that my throat was sore and my nose was running before I knew it. What I didn't know was that I had contracted swine flu, and now I find it amazing that I'm alive to tell the tale.

Actually, that's not true.

It's not that amazing that I survived the swine flu epidemic. In fact, everyone I know who caught the illness regarded it more as a pain in(side) the neck than as a life-threatening condition. Swine flu is just that, a flu derived from pigs, and though the flu can be dangerous, much of the time it ends up treating people like the common cold.

When swine flu first broke through in the media, El Cajon, the city I lived in, was a scary place to be. Mexico, the country with the first recorded swine flu fatalities, was only 25 miles away. Whenever someone fell sick at school, a swine flu rumor swept the halls. Luckily, I was spared the disease then, but I watched the news in fear as it slowly spread around the world.

Then one day I heard a National Public Radio broadcast about swine flu. Knowing the station to be reliable, I listened intently, and to my surprise learned that the media had really only been focused on the fatal cases of swine flu, and had ignored the 'normal' cases. I couldn't believe it! Swine flu was just like any other flu; it killed in some cases, but the only real reasons it received any attention was because it was derived from swine, and was a strain of flu that humans had not yet developed antibodies with which to fight it.

At that point, I lost all fear of the dreaded swine flu, and the subject was at the back of my mind when I moved up to Berkeley in August. All of a sudden, once classes had begun, I heard talk of a spreading disease. Sure enough, the swine flu had moved northward, following in my footsteps. This time it got personal. In chairs to my left and right, classmates coughed and wheezed. People were blowing their noses and germs were everywhere. I, as a new college student, didn't stand a chance. I succumbed to the flu, and suffered for a good two weeks before the last cough left my system. Not once through the episode had I spent an entire day in bed, and the worst that happened to me was that I depleted my tissue box more quickly than I would have liked. I also upped my vitamin C intake, drinking plenty of orange juice.

The epidemic must have taken at least a third of Berkeley's students, but thankfully, not one of them died. There were choruses of coughing in all of my lectures as swine flu hit its prime among infected students, but they were not too disturbing. Overall, swine flu was a media-driven epidemic, overblown and hyped up way more than it need be. It's not a good sign for citizens when their media panics them unnecessarily. In this fearful and skeptical world of ours, the last thing we need is a media that turns into the "Boy Who Cried 'Pig.'"