SWINE FLU BRUSHED ME BY...AND I WAS TARRED 'CONTAGIOUS'

For over three months, the swine flu was just something that was happening in the US of A and nether lands of Mexico...Little shakes here except to for local bureaus who had to keep tabs on NRIs who came bearing the bug along with the motley suitcases.. the only story then was about how screening at the airports was the biggest running joke…this side of the Atlantic…

In fact, I distinctly remember India’s first case of swine flu…the boy tested positive in Hyderabad…No news channel could be bothered to do a story on him…YSR and Chandrababu Naidu had laid siege to the nation’s journalistic bastions’ word count then…It was just a kind of flu that bourgeois US’ thin-skinned citizens were succumbing like nine-pins too…

Then Andhra Pradesh was called ‘the hotbed of swine flu’…Testing positive was the news till a fourteen year old girl’s death last Monday, threw India into a tizzy....Poooffff….Swine flu turned killer….the OBs rushed…the expensive batteries to make microphones cordless ( to help reporters beeline towards an escaping official and not worry about injuring twenty others by tripping them over wires) dispatched by the dozens from stores across the fifty odd television channels scrambling for each TRP point up for grabs…

I wasn’t in the first batch of journos dispatched like bulk orders from Mumbai…But I didn’t survive too long in the sanitized desk environs….As soon as visuals of the virtual stampede outside the lone testing centre at Naidu Hospital in Pune hit the airwaves, I was packed off…

So there I was flitting through the familiar roads of Pune, nearly nine years after I put finishing touches on my precocious journalism skills..

I was there for three days…and I saw it all…the realization….the scare….the panic and very soon the acceptance that this unknown virus was here to stay…atleast for a while till our sturdy brown bodies developed its own immunity to its potency…

 

The most heartrending was the worry on the faces of parents with really young children writhing with fever and sniffling through it…and then the loners who walked in after self educating themselves on what were the symptoms of the virus that killed little Rida…and then there were some scamsters too…people who decided to just ‘drop unconscious’ outside the Naidu hospital’s wards, to save themselves the long long wait in the hot hot sun…the sad part is the visuals were so dramatic…they got looped over and over…a sturdy man collapses….the harassed doctor already checking out four patients rush out…try to wake up a now ‘blubbering near dead victim’….call for a stretcher…four guilty when some anchor asked me about how anxious patients were literally dropping unconscious with fever with no one to check up on them…Yes, it was true, there were fewer resources, stretched to the limits…and these scamsters were the exception to the rule…But I felt nauseated when I saw the same unconscious gentleman slither away with his wife when the cameras were turned elsewhere after turning in his tests…

Through the tests, the interviews, the wait outside Sassoon Hospital where the critically ill patients succumbed one after the other, we kept our surgical masks on…and we were protected…Or so we thought…

The day I returned, I felt my throat grow scratchy….One day back at my desk the frozen air got to my lungs....and my throat and lungs decided to pack up in unison… And then I knew the extent of paranoia caused by three deaths till then…..One look at me on Monday morning, and I was the outcast….the symptoms of swine flu, that I had failed to fathom were obvious to everyone on the desk…to be charitable to the worrywarts, they were after all putting out views of everyone who had two pennies of opinion on the swine flu…Nothing was worth the risk….

So for over a week now, Im in home quarantine…nursing a bad chest congestion and cold…checking myself for the one symptom that could make the two symptoms I’d already ticked on my sick list….fever…the fever never came…so I was positively negative….but I somehow got labeled ‘CONTAGIOUS’….