Swine Flu

This weekend I took care of a 25 year old teacher who got swine flu from one of his students. This was admittedly a bit unsettling - most of the people we care for are considerably older than us and their hearts and lungs are failing from years of eating cheeseburgers and smoking, but this guy is my age, he was completely healthy (he was a track coach) a week ago and now he is in our ICU because of a disease that he could still give to me... which is why Kell and I (Kell was the other nurse assigned to him - he was sick enough to need two of us!) looked like this all weekend:

Left:

Nurse

Kell

Right:

Nurse

Paige

The photos aren't great because they were taken on my phone by a nurse outside the room. Since this guy has Swine Flu he has to be in a negative pressure room, meaning that we have to enter and exit his room through an anteroom that constantly has the air being pulled out of it (like a chemistry lab ventilation hood) so that his germs can't get to the rest of the patients. The flu is transmitted through droplets of moisture in the air he breathes so we were safer because he is on a ventilator but we were still wearing special masks (that were very tight and hot) to prevent us from breathing in any errant germs and we had to wear the gloves, gowns, goggles and booties in the event that we came in contact with any sputum. Suffice it to say that I took a very long shower last night.