The only acceptable answer is “YES!” No doubt about that one. There are children and adults battling cancer who have compromised (or non-existent) immune systems. They call it “neutropenia.” Neutrophils rise and fall depending on the body’s reaction to chemotherapy. There’s no exact science to control it. So a child might have enough neutrophils to protect her from germs, bacteria and viruses one day - and then the next day the bottom falls out of her counts, and she’s totally unprotected. Until she goes to clinic for her weekly or monthly blood counts, she doesn’t know she’s so vulnerable and unprotected. They can wear masks and use hand sanitizer religiously but that still won’t protect them from everything.

Now just imagine that this child goes to the grocery store with her mom. In the store is someone who has the flu. Not a bad case - just a little congestion and slight fever. No big deal. The person sneezes or coughs or put his hand on a cart - and one of those flu viruses just happens to find its way to the cancer kid. It’s not likely, but it could happen. It does happen.

So the flu which was no big deal to the healthy person, ends up putting the cancer kid in the hospital. . . or worse. In the past year I know of two precious children here in Tennessee who died because they caught a stupid virus - something that a healthy person would barely notice. But for a child with a compromised immune system, it ended up deadly. It’s not just the immune system. Chemo is so hard on a child’s body. It weakens the heart and other organs. Sometimes the fight that the body must wage against a virus is more than the weakened heart can manage.

And so a child is left fighting for his/her life while the person who passed along that virus has no clue of the damage he’s done.

I’ll be getting the seasonal flu shot AND the H1N1 flu shot. What’s a couple of shots compared to the possibility - however remote - of passing along a life-threatening illness to a precious cancer kid.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 10:41 pm and is filed under This 'n That. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.