I Thought It Was Just the Flu. Then I Nearly Died.

Worried about avian flu? The real threats to your health are closer to home.

Scary Symptoms

Last January, Sara Bryant, 21, an interior design student in San Diego, thought she'd picked up a bug over the holidays. A petite powerhouse who often worked out hours a day, she thought she'd shake it off quickly. Instead, she kept feeling worse. "I had no energy," she recalls. "I was completely drained. Every joint ached. Even my skin hurt." Soon she became too weak to stay alone when her husband, Bradley, went to work.

"I had that 'mom sense' that something was really wrong," says Nancy Sunday, Sara's mother, who brought her ailing daughter to her home. On January 10, she took Sara to a doctor, who diagnosed a bad flu that had settled into her joints. He prescribed ibuprofen, but it didn't help. She was getting sicker and sicker.

You can't open a newspaper now without seeing scary stories about the possibility of a global pandemic of bird flu. And, yes, if the virus does mutate, allowing it to pass easily from person to person, that will be a frightening scenario. But that possibility is remote compared with the very real threats to your health found much closer to home. Influenza and pneumonia, for example, lead to 65,681 deaths and 1.5 million hospitalizations a year in the United States. They are among the many dangerous infectious diseases that can be contracted in the most innocuous-seeming ways: from petting an animal to spending time outdoors where mosquitoes and ticks hide; even a simple handshake could lead to something deadly.

Sara's fever persisted, and soon it became clear that her illness was serious. She had shaking chills. Her skin turned yellow. Every movement was excruciating. On January 14 Nancy, who'd never seen her daughter so sick, took her to another doctor, who immediately sent Sara to the emergency room at Scripps Mercy Hospital.

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“ Use your knuckle to rub your eyes. It's less likely to be contaminated with viruses than your fingertip. ”

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A hospital corpsman and I were getting an elderly retired master chief petty officer out of his wheelchair, when I noticed the man had a tattoo on his knee. "What's that?" I asked, unable to make out the design. "It's a banjo," he said sheepishly. "I'm from Alabama."

-- Mary K. Parker