No, seriously. Get your flu shot.
At my early November doctor visit I felt a bit under the weather, so we chose to wait. Then I got busy.
And I have just spent one of the worst weeks of my entire life as a result. Tried to tell it that it was a cold. The first three days of writhing joint aches and chills were only the beginning.
Imagine every deep breath resulting in a good minute of convulsive, car-engine-trying-to-turn-over coughs until you feel faint from no oxygen, that finally spark and kick into truly gut wrenching, every muscle in your body clenched yeti howl coughs that cause a blinding headache, to maybe, if you are lucky, actually dredge from your lungs a plug of the thick sewage sludge, and having to expel nauseating lard lumps of it out of your trachea before it suffocates you – talking Linda Blair in the Exorcist amounts – and getting about 10 to 15 seconds before it happens all over again, for over 48 hours straight, when any sleep is counted in minutes during the 15 minutes every 4 hours when the Advil actually stops your chills and aches. And then laying there for another 3 days as it slowly lessens.