"Tired, beleaguered and battered" is how Dr. David del Rosario described himself yesterday as he hustled to care for the rising tide of patients streaming into his Patient First clinic in Glen Burnie with symptoms of the flu.
"We started seeing the trickle in mid-January," he said, "and literally by the first week of February, that's when the tsunami hit."
Since then, del Rosario's life has been a blur of 10-hour days in a succession of Patient First sites in suburban Maryland and a parade of patient misery.
"One guy said, 'Doc, if I had hair, my hair would hurt.' "
Public health and hospital officials say that seasonal influenza, with all its aches, fevers and assorted other agonies, is indeed on the increase in Maryland this month, with a peak due in the next three or four weeks.
"You worry most about the very old and the very young," said Leigh Chapman, manager of infection control at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson. Confirmed cases there have jumped from five during all of January to 18 already this month.
Two patients, ages 83 and 69, have been hospitalized at St. Joseph with severe symptoms. The rest have been treated in the emergency room or other intake centers and released. Many more, probably, are suffering at home.
"We do assume that influenza is underreported. Most people don't come in and get tested," Chapman said.
Melissa Cyr sat in del Rosario's examining room yesterday afternoon, waiting for her flu test. She looked weak, flushed and very unhappy. The 16-year-old from Columbia was brought to the clinic by her father, city paramedic Craig Cyr, after she fell ill over the weekend.
On Sunday, she said, "I woke up, sat up and got really woozy, and the room was spinning. My dad came into my room, and I was really shivering."
She slept from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., then complained of weakness and trouble breathing. "Every time I try to take a deep breath, I cough," she said. Her appetite had fled.
Del Rosario took samples to test her for influenza and strep throat and planned an X-ray to look for pneumonia.
He estimated that 30 percent of the people he has seen recently with respiratory complaints have turned out to have influenza. And while their symptoms have not been any worse than in past years, patients are coming in with more complications.
"Flu and strep; flu and pneumonia - that's what we're seeing a lot of," he said. One of those patients was a 3-year-old girl in Waldorf who was struggling with all three - flu, strep and pneumonia.
