Last winter, in the span of a week, I had two things happen: A family friend buried his healthy 50-year-old sister-in-law, who went to Mexico feeling fine, and came home in a coffin a few days later, dead from the flu. They tried to get her home to an ICU bed in Los Angeles, but there were none available, all taken up by other flu patients. The doctors the family were in communication with in L.A. were monitoring her condition and assured the family there was nothing more they could have done for her in the United States.

Later that week, on Christmas Day, our baby slept 19 hours straight until we decided to wake him up. He was disoriented and had a low-grade fever for an hour after we woke him up, and barely wanted to eat. After consulting his pediatrician (who is a bit too trigger happy about going to the ER) and a pediatrician friend (who is far more laid back on such matters), we decided to bring him into the hospital to be evaluated. It was the middle of the flu epidemic, and despite the two of us being vaccinated, I was hyper-vigilant about staying away from people coughing, not letting the baby touch anything, and washing hands with hand sanitizer. While we were waiting to see a doctor, we heard one of the attendings talking to a family in the cubical next to ours. She told the family “This isn’t a severe enough illness to warrant an ER trip. You have all been exposed to the flu while you were sitting here. We had a child die in this hospital from the flu this week.” Not exactly what you want to hear sitting beyond the curtain with your sick baby. Thankfully, the baby was fine, and neither of us came down with the flu.