It’ll take me a while to forget that bed I slept in last weekend. Although it was so not mine – and it was just one night – I keep thinking about who was there before me . . . and who will follow in their preparations to go to places I can only imagine.

I took an upper bunk, probably because it lifted me farther up and away from the nasty floor. And, I also wanted to be near the window, even though the sill was stocked with an old can of bug spray, plus lots of small-scale litter (little heads and legs and wings, perhaps?). It was raining buckets outside, and the sound of water pellets promised to comfort me.

As I tried to sleep throughout that one single stretch of time, I wondered what my husband was doing and thinking in another spot on the military grounds we were occupying as volunteer participants in our state’s first pandemic flu training exercise.

Thinking myself resourceful, if not rugged, I settled into sleeplessness, dreaming of the chance to get back home to my own bed.

The reality check was worthwhile. So was the role play with first responders who might someday try to save lives in waves of human discomfort and distress. Our job was to help them practice with people willing to play out what medical professionals and law enforcement officials could encounter with human beings desperate to protect themselves and their families.

Influenza, commonly called “the flu,” is an illness we hear about often in mainstream medicine and media. Our collaborative training reinforced the fact that flu can be serious, especially if the virus infection hits children or older folks, and people with health conditions that make them more vulnerable to life-threatening complications. We focused on the fact that flu is a respiratory illness that spreads by infected people coughing and sneezing – and others touching germ-squirming surfaces and then putting their fingers to their eyes, noses, and mouths.

Flu symptoms include headache, high fever, dry cough, runny or stuffy nose, muscle aches and pains, tiredness, and sore throat. Flu comes in either a combination of all of the symptoms or just a few at a time. The “stomach flu” we associate with throwing up and having diarrhea is usually not the flu after all. Tummy troubles typically relate to other stuff that doesn’t agree with us – like too-fast food or too little time to nourish our bodies with good rest and everyday stress recovery.

The mattress I claimed last weekend had hosted many women before me – military personnel enjoying comforts of home before shipping out to service in other countries. I had just 24 hours of duty before going home to relieve symptoms brought on by my own experience in an atmosphere foreign to me.

Pandemic flu isn’t all I know more about now. Higher levels of personal humility and pride in others should be showing up soon in my real-world health report.