He did a good job of keeping it quiet, but now the truth can be told: Sheffie Kadane is the city council’s first swine flu victim.
I called Kadane after hearing he hadn’t been feeling well, and he said it all started around his June 25 neighborhood budget meeting at Winfrey Point, when he started feeling ill and had to leave early. Soon thereafter, he found himself in the hospital for four days and became a statistic in the government’s swine-flu tracking list. (According to the website, Kadane is among 6,506 people hospitalized in the U.S. since the swine flu scare began.)
"It wasn’t like the normal flu," Kadane says. "This was, if you coughed, it hit your respiratory system and your stomach. It was like you had been doing situps for two days straight, and now it was the third day, and I thought it was going to rip my stomach apart."
Kadane says he missed Lakewood’s annual 4th of July parade for the first time in many years due to the illness, and he spent a couple of weeks in early July recuperating. Luckily, he says, the illness coincided with the council’s July recess, so he didn’t wind up missing many council duties.
And if there’s a bright spot to being a swine flu victim, Kadane seems to have found one: "One good thing — I don’t have to get the swine flu shot now."
