Flu season in Texas

A Flu shot may be worth it

I’m reconsidering.  Sometimes it take a severe blow upside the head to help me reconsider my point of view, but it may happen this time.   You see, for the past several days I have been near death with the flu.   I confess I have actually been sicker than I am this time, but it has been a while.

It started last Wednesday and escalated from there.  I consulted all the medical experts I could find.  My medical experts included the internet, friends at the coffee shop, email buddies, my brother, and my dogs.  Then my wife took the unorthodox action of calling our doctor.  She drove into town and gathered up several potions and pills and an actual prescription and started filling me up with them.

A few days before coming down with the flu, I had been out fighting a pasture fire that came a little too close to the house.  Unlike a certain president, I did inhale.  There was a 35 mph wind blowing a raging grass fire straight towards our house and I managed to gulp down copious amounts of smoke, dust, and debris blowing all around me.  I really did not think too much about all that because I had been to many grass fires in my newspaper days, and it had not bothered me too much in the past.

Then my brother convinced me that I had breathed an entire pasture full of mold, fungus, and mossy lichen that grows on mesquite trees.   His descriptions of all that I had probably inhaled were detailed.   I just got sicker and sicker.  I had actually planned a 3 day weekend in San Antonio with friends celebrating the 175th Anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo.  That all was canceled and instead I lay in the bed with my nurse dogs, playing the role of Jim Bowie on his sickbed at the Alamo.

Things got a little better by Monday and then Tuesday, I actually went to the post office and the hardware store.  I still have a hacking cough and look forward to Nyquil which most people hate.  A friend recommended a glass of Jack Daniels and it may become a staple in my medicine chest.  The active prescription was Amoxil.  I used to buy Amoxil by the big jar at the Farmacia in Mexico.  All us Real Texas boys were raised on Mexico medicines and later in life I used to go to Mexico to fill a long list of prescriptions for my aging parents.  But the wife is very narrow minded and thinks that only the HEB pharmacy has any good pills these days.  That’s  OK only because I don’t go to Mexico anymore.

So, I may recover this time.  However, in a moment of weakness I stated to the wife, “If you don’t get sick from all this, I’m going to get a flu shot too next year.”

I have never had a flu shot and she gets them every year.  Guess I’m a slow learner.

She is as perky as ever and has been really bothering me all through this.  She has been on the go constantly, updating her blogs and pictures, typing away clickety-clack for hours at a time on her laptop next to me and the nurse dogs, and nary a flu symptom to be seen or heard.

I’m getting my flu shot next year too.  And I’ll fill my medicine chest with bottles of medicinal potions.

I am so ready to get back to being invincible again.

Tagged as: david werst, Texas Humor, Texas Lifestyle