I’ve been told several times in my life that stubbornness will get me in trouble one day. Earlier this month, that proved true once again when I caught a case of the flu.

About three months ago, the staff at Iberia Medical Center was kind of enough to set up a day for employees at The Daily Iberian to receive flu shots. When everyone in the newsroom got up to go, an editor asked if I was going to get one. I believe I responded with a line, softly laughing, like, “I don’t believe in that hocus pocus.”

To be fair, I was probably busy working on some news story for the next day and decided the effort to get up and walk down the hall wasn’t worth the statistical possibility of contracting a disease that is unusually severe this year. 

It was a bad roll of the dice. While working on a Sunday night earlier this month, I got into a really bad coughing fit that lasted all the way home. That quickly led to shivers, extreme fatigue, a runny nose, sore throat, loss of appetite and general weakness. 

I plugged in those symptoms on Google. Yep, it was the flu. 

Instead of infecting the rest of New Iberia, I decided to take the week off and stayed mostly bedridden over the next six days. Luckily, the bug only lasted a week and I was feeling my old self again quickly after that. The only person who I may have infected was my mom, who was nice enough to bring me soup one day. Sorry mom. 

Unfortunately, mine isn’t the only case of someone getting sick this flu season. Since the Center for Disease Control began monitoring in October, there have been 60,000 samples that have tested positive for influenza in either clinical or public laboratories. 

The CDC reported the hospitalization rate is 22.7-percent per 100,000 U.S. residents. In Louisiana, Dr. Frank Welch said in a publicly released statement that the flu causes 700 deaths and nearly 8,000 hospitalizations each year. Louisiana was on track to meet or exceed those numbers, according to Welch.

The state health department noticed the trend and offered free flu shots to residents Wednesday. At the New Iberia location, nurses had received a stack of papers from clients in only the first hour.

For those lucky enough to have been unaffected so far, I urge you take every precaution and get a shot as soon as possible. Coming from personal experience, it ain’t fun.

COREY VAUGHN is the senior staff writer for The Daily Iberian.