My roomate’s sick right now with what the doctor said is most likely some strain of influenza (althogh he’s not 100% sure). He started getting sick Friday, and by last night he ended up going into the doctor. Symptoms are a fever, soreness/aches, dizzyness, and coughing. When he went in the doctor said his temp was 103, and his heart rate was pretty high. They gave him an IV and a prescription for some pain and flu related stuff.
Now, I’ve got a trip planned starting next week Tuesday, and would like to avoid getting sick myself at all costs. So far I feel fine, altough I’m sure that probably doesn’t mean I’m not already infected. Besides avoiding him as much as possible, is there anything else I should do? To be honest, I’ve got somewhere else I can stay which would be only a minor inconvience, should I do that? Is there anything else I might want to do, such as taking vitamins or drinking liquids or OJ or whatever? Assuming I am infected, how can I reduce the severity or duration of when I get sick?
Ask your doctor whether you might benefit from Tamiflu (oseltamivir). It’s a drug used to treat folks in the very early stages of the flu, or to give to people who have been exposed to it and who can’t afford to be sick (usually those with otherwise compromised health).
Seriously, I’d go stay somewhere else if you really don’t want to get sick. Flu is bitchily contagious. And get a flu shot. The woman who sits six feet away from me at work had a flu recently, and sat there coughing all day without covering her mouth; I managed not to get it, and I credit my flu shot in fall and rigourous hand-washing (in hot water, with soap), and keeping my fingers out of my face (mouth, nose, eyes and ears).
ETA: Mostly I credit the flu shot - handwashing doesn’t do much for someone sitting there spraying their droplet infection in your face.
ouch! Especially if you’re going to travel by air–I’ve found that, for me at least, air travel can exacerbate terribly any minor respiratory infection I might have. And it doesn’t have to be a long flight; this happened to me returning from Las Vegas to L.A. one time.
One, don’t touch your nose, eyes, mouth, arms, chest, hair, etc with your hands. Just don’t do it. If you can cut them off and throw them across the room, that would be swell.
Not only should you wash your hands regularly with hopefully antibacterial soap, but buy some liquid hand sanitizer, like Germ-X. Use it religiously. Especially after touching a surface he may have touched.
Get Lysol spray and attack all doorknobs/door handles in the house he’s come in contact with. This is war, man. Keep Lysol on hand at all times for this.
Alternatively and also importantly, he’s coughing, those things are airborne, so get the kind of air freshener that also sanitizes the air. Land and air warfare now, buddy. Become the virus assassin.
And get yourself one of these. Yes, it’s pink. Real men wear pink. Well that or you can get the ones with Pikachu or Doraemon on it. …yes, you want the pink one now, don’tcha.
All you’d be missing now are the tiny germ-sized atom bombs.
I’m working on it.
Edit: Oh yeah, and if you don’t like the smell of Lysol, go for the orange-scented Clorox wipes. You can be safe and smell like you live where an orange juice grenade went off.
I’d stay somewhere else, if you can. The flu is a bitch; and missing a trip because of the flu sucks even more. Or going and developing symptoms on the way, or even worse, infecting your travelmate.
Besides, both you and your roommate will both feel uncomfortable if you walk around the apartment with the hygienic countermeasures mentioned above.
Alright, I decided to stay elsewhere, and I’m outta there for a while. I left this morning, and am not planning on returning until at least when roomate is fully recovered, and more likely I’ll just stay away until I get back from my trip. I really appreciate the advice I’ve received from the posters in this thread.
I do have another question or two too, now that I’m at least away from further exposure. How long until I get sick, if by chance I did get infected? The flu didn’t really hit my roomate until Friday, altough he thinks it may have been coming a day or two previous. We are only both home and awake for a few hours a day, so there’s not a whole lot of overlap, but we do share a bathroom and a fair amount of living space, etc. To be honest, I think the biggest chance for eposure would have been yestereday, when I gave him two rides in my car, and he was also in the room when I was eating (he coughed a bit, but not necessarily in my direction I hope).
Of course my main hope to avoid getting sick at all, but I’d settle for it hitting me now and being recovered before I leave in 9 days. How does the timing of this look? Should I at least know by then if I missed it or not? Or, do I run the risk of either being sick when I am supposed to leave, or coming down with symptoms during my trip?
This is not a trip I should miss (i.e. work related and important), but of course I’m not going to subject felow travelers and co-workers to my illness if it comes down to that. How worried should I be about this affecting my trip?
Before youn start hosing the air with useless chemicals, think again. Your lungs are already stressed out, and to be blunt you need to actually contact the germs with the germicidal chemicals, so spritzing it around is pretty much useless. All you are doing is masking smells and giving yourself the warm fuzzy feeling that you are ding something.
If you really dont want to breath it in, wear a mask [or make the roomie wear the mask], and antibacterial soap is really not that much more effective than regular soap until you really get into the prescription stuff like phisohex. Warm water and 30 seconds is good. Follow the directions with the quaternary wipes and let the surfaces dry before touching, and maintaining a healthy diet to support your immune system.
To be blunt, blunt, all the advice in this thread (save mine about the Tamiflu) is probably useless to you. You’ve already been exposed, the rest of it is locking the barn door after the horse is gone.
If you’d followed the advice about handwashing and masks before your roommate got sick, it might have helped, but it is unlikely to now, since you’ve been around your roommate while he has active symptoms.
Thanks Qadgop I appreciate the honesty, and the advice of course. I don’t think I’ll be able to do the Tamiflu thing because I don’t think I’ve got a doctor or know how to get a hold of them if I do, but I’d be all over that otherwise. I’m just crossing my fingers now that either I somehow miss getting sick, or that it doesn’t hit me as hard as it did my roomate, or at the very least if I do get sick it happens now so I can be better in time to travel.