In fact, I confess I HOPED it was! What journalist wouldn’t want to report on an “epidemic” firsthand? Granted, maybe one who is saner than I. Further, we are in the traditional Ratings Sweeps Period, when the media tends to get a bit more overheated in story coverage and more risqué in the story selection (one reason the flu pandemic story was guaranteed to turn into a big one).

What News Director wouldn’t be interested in letting his audience in on what it’s like to suffer/die of the “plague of the month”? As it happened, I never got the chance to find out if our ND is among that number. I went to see Dr. Michael Vaughn at Potomac Prompt who promptly dashed my dream of filing a “Going Inside the Swine Flu!” report. 

“Your problem is pollen. It’s just a sinus infection and it’s also affecting your vocal cords now.” “But I’ve never had sinus infections from hay fever before,” I told him. Then, apparently drawing upon his years of study and practice he said, “So?” 

Actually, Dr. Vaughn explained what many of us have been experiencing in this region but have been unable to pin down. The last three winters have not been cold enough to thoroughly kill off each year’s foliage. As a result we now have ’06, ‘07 and ’08 pollens in the air now with ‘09’s contribution. Any one or two years on their own is not a major problem. It’s when you get this many generations of stuff in the air at the same time that you begin to overrun the human immune system and drive our histamine production off the charts. That’s the stuff that makes the noses run and the phlegm build up, and in cases like mine, lead to afflictions in parts of the body outside of the sinus cavity.

“I’ve seen more patients this Spring for pollen-related sinus infections than I ever have,” he told me, “and I can’t tell you how many of them think they have the swine flu!”

Glad I didn’t tell him what I was thinking.