Flu-assessment clinic being flooded BY BARB SWEET The Telegram

Shane Pretty, 6, holds up his number card at the flu assessment clinic on Ropewalk Lane in St. John's Thursday. He waited in the family car with his mother, rather than inside the clogged clinic. — Photo by Barb Sweet/The Telegram

Outside the flu assessment clinic on Ropewalk Lane Thursday, a middle-age woman sporting a face mask braced herself on a concrete garbage can as she tried to get her breath in the middle of a hacking coughing fit.
“Oh my God, I can’t get my breath,” she said, as another woman nearby offered a cough drop.
The coughing woman refused the offer, fearing she’d choke on it.
“I got to get my breath back and get it under control,” gasped the bent-over woman.
Once her cough died down, the woman, who didn’t want her name used, explained the flu came on suddenly and severely.
“I was taking down the Halloween decorations Sunday and I never had a leg under me,” she said.
“You can’t get rid of the headache.”
She listed off other family members stricken with the illness.
“My grandson was diagnosed with (H1N1) yesterday and my son is in (the clinic),” she said of a couple of them.
As the coughing woman regained enough control to walk back inside, another woman preparing to join the lineup and overhearing her distress told a friend, “I don’t know if I want to go in there.”
The clinic — for people already sick, or suspected to be sick with H1N1 —   got underway at 112 Ropewalk Lane in the centre of St. John’s with signs in the window listing symptoms and precautionary measures, but also advising “no immunizations here.”
Eastern Health officials said despite prior publicity, people were showing up with the mistaken belief the clinic was giving out vaccines. One woman slowly whirred along the Ropewalk parking  lot on a motorized scooter Thursday morning saying she thought it was an immunization clinic and asking passersby where the closest one was — the only two in metro now are MacDonald Drive Junior High and the Reid Centre in Mount Pearl.
The H1N1 assessment clinic had been relocated from Major’s Path, which saw its patient numbers almost triple in just a few days.
Health officials have been saying it’s best to stay home with the flu, but coming to a flu assessment clinic is better than going to a hospital emergency room.
Tony Ricks of Mount Pearl showed up at Ropewalk Lane Thursday to check out symptoms like wheezing, weakness, a cough and shortness of breath that have been increasing for almost a week.
“It’s just getting worse,” said Ricks, who first tried the Health Sciences Centre and was told there would be a five-hour wait.
Officials at the Ropewalk Lane clinic cut off registration at around 6 p.m. at 183 people, although they expected to be seeing patients until well after the scheduled closing time of 8 p.m.
According to Eastern Health, people started showing up at the clinic at 8:30 a.m. Thursday. They either took numbers or waited inside. At midday Thursday, the clinic had a line out the door and traffic to the area was steady. By mid-afternoon the clinic was blocked solid. Inside, people with masks on could be seen waiting their turn. Some arrived to the lineup with their own masks.
Some wore pyjamas and hoodies. Others huddled behind scarves and winter clothing in the bracing November wind.
And while many arrived coughing and showing obvious signs of illness, some others strolled up with cups of Tims from the shop nearby, bags of takeout and some even smoked outside.
Inside, the patients were to be triaged, with the worst off to be seen first. Parents held on to bundled-up children toting stuffed animals, fearing worrisome symptoms would worsen before they got a chance to be vaccinated.
Angela Pretty of St. John’s waited in her car with her son, Shane. As the clinic geared up, they were given No. 225.
“Half his class is out,” said Pretty, who stayed up all night monitoring the six-year-old’s fever.
He came home from school Wednesday and went right to sleep with a sore throat and other flu-like symptoms, waking up long enough to take a bath.
He had no appetite and she had to coax him to drink some juice Thursday morning.
“His own doctor wouldn’t even see him,” she said. “I expect I’m here for the day. It could be nothing, but you can’t take any chances with this — people are ending up in intensive care.”
She said the vaccines should have been given out right away in school. Though they started Thursday, Shane’s school, Larkhall Academy, isn’t scheduled until Tuesday.
Pretty said in her other son’s class, 14 of the 24 students are absent.
At one of the schools on the vaccination schedule Thursday, Mary Queen of Peace, there was a steady stream of parents rushing in to be with children who wanted comforting while receiving the vaccine.
Nelly Ebdelfathah said her two children were nervous, but she was relieved they would get the shot in school rather than one of the mass immunization clinics.
“They won’t have to wait a lot,” she said.
Another woman, who didn’t want to be named, said the schools should be closed until the virus dies down.
“Children are exposed, teachers are exposed,” she said.
Meanwhile some 300 kids in K-3 were vaccinated at the school, said principal Elaine Harris.
“It went perfect,” she said.

bsweet@thetelegram.com