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The swine flu keeps getting closer to Blanco County, raising the question: how do you care for a swine flu patient at home if the doctors and hospitals are too swamped to be much help?

The good news is you’re not completely alone. Right now, the case load isn’t overwhelming, so doctors’ offices and hospitals have time to help. Later, when the surge of pandemic cases hits the county, that may change.

“Caring for an H1N1 patient is much like caring for someone with any other flu,” said Mark Rogers, RN, Director of Care Management at Hill Country Memorial Hospital System in Fredericksburg. “There are a few differences, though. One is that this flu hits children harder than older patients, so we need to focus more on caring for a young patient. Another is this flu can turn bad fast, so we need to know the danger signs and watch for them in any patient.”

How to do that — and more — will be the topic of Rogers’ class on home-care for the flu patient Saturday morning, Sept 26, at 9 am at the Community Church of the Hills, 212 Klett Rd, off Towhead Valley Rd, west of Johnson City. The class is free and open to the public.

Rogers emphasized that the swine flu is not a particularly severe flu...no more dangerous than the regular strains we see every year. The danger in H1N1 is that so many people are expected to get it, and even a small percentage of problems in a huge number of cases still is a big number of problem cases.

“Like other hospitals, Hill Country Memorial has been planning and preparing for the pandemic,” Rogers said. “We’re hoping the problem turns out to be less than expected, but it looks like a bad flu season for all of us.”

The Texas Department of State Health Services also has been preparing. Public health nurse Dorothy Dawson brought some early-delivery seasonal flu vaccine doses last week when she came to Blanco County for her new monthly vaccination series. Word of the vaccine got out, though, and Dawson arrived to find a line of people waiting for her.

“We’ll be back with a big shot clinic from 9 to noon on Wednesday, October 21, in the Activity Building of the First United Methodist Church in Johnson City,” Dawson said. “We know we’ll have the regular seasonal flu vaccine for adults and children. There’s no word yet on when H1N1 vaccine will be here, though.”

Training for volunteers to help with the shot clinics was held in Blanco, Johnson City and Cypress Mill earlier this month. Training for volunteers in other capacities is ongoing, as a coalition of churches, government agencies and social service organizations builds a support net for Blanco County residents who will be patients or caregivers during the flu pandemic this year.

On Saturday, more than a dozen residents learned how to look up flu facts in notebooks for callers to a flu information telephone hotline. When the virus begins circulating in Blanco County, the hotline will open to help neighbors avoid — or treat— influenza successfully.

For more information on these events, or to volunteer to help, call George Barnette at 713-252-2288.

That may look like a dagger Dorothy Dawson is using on Larry Martin of Blanco, but it’s actually good hypodermic technique. Dawson is a community health nurse for the Texas Department of State Health Services, and Martin was on the pointy end of one of the first regular flu shots of the season last week. Martin said her technique looked vicious but it worked...he didn’t cry at all. Dawson and crew will return in late October for a bigger shot clinic. For those who will get the flu before then, the county’s flu preparation coalition offers a class on how to care for a flu patient at home without medical support. It will be free and open to the public at the Community Church of the Hills at 212 Klett Ranch Rd, off Towhead Valley Rd, north of US 290 west of Johnson City.