The ER looked crowded with overflow into the hallway of parents and children wearing face masks. Throughout the hospital, I kept running into moms with a mask haphazardly covering their mouth but not their nose and a toddler with his mask around his neck. They didn’t seem sure of where they were going or what the diagnosis would be. Was I in a remake of the Dustin Hoffman movie, Outbreak, from the 90’s? I tried to tell myself not to overreact. Somehow I got a reputation for being dramatic in my family and I’d like to live it down eventually. But this was scary. All over the hospital where I work in Arts in Healthcare, signs explained the new rules that siblings and friends are no longer allowed to visit patients and detailed the symptoms to watch out for that may point to Swine Flu– all an effort to keep exposure down.

A fifteen year old boy came into the hospital on Friday and lost his life there on Saturday due to a severe case of Swine Flu, accompanied by Pneumonia and MRSA. Another patient also faces a dire situation, and many others are being treated for Swine Flu or Influenza A. I worked with a patient with a fever the other day without even thinking about it. Now I’m concerned. The news is grim, between reports from Iran and the rush hour train crash in D.C. today, but the hysteria over the Swine Flu died down not too long after it dragged my friends back from their honeymoon in Mexico. Why was the fear of it nationally newsworthy, but the reality of it hushed? We’ve all heard how the common flu has taken the lives of the elderly, small children, and the immunosuppressed, but would you have known that the Swine Flu could take the life of a teenager or that at least 63 people have already died of it in the U.S.? Perhaps it’s easier to keep washing our hands and staving off panic.