A mate used to say when it rains, it pours. It happens to most of us. Events don’t just happen by half. Things just take off in a way that leaves you feeling reeled. Well, a bit.

The Age a few days ago suggested as many as a third of Victoria may be infected with the piggy flu. Even if that preposterous proposition turns out to be true, our household has beaten it. Kiddo and I makes two-thirds. For all you know Tress may also have had it but she never had any temperature so chances are she didn’t have it.

That period starting 6 June hit a nadir, (most probably) on 9 June. I was nursing a bad case of flu, the day was miserably cold (with rain and hail) and each of us was separated from the others. Kiddo was holed up in an isolation ward somewhere in KL GeneralHospital. Tress was quarantined at her parents’ home in Klang and I was wrapped in a few jumpers under a blanket here in Melbourne.

Francis Coppola’s Godfather trilogy kept me company that day, with intermittent surfing on the internet but what I really wanted was for the day to get warmer and for the aches and pains to ease up. Not for the first or last time I also wished we had a dog. He or she wasn’t going to fetch me a hot cup of tea or bring me my cough medicine but the company would have been far better than the Corleones.

The single piece of good news that day was Kiddo would be able to leave the hospital the next day.

Ah well, it’s all behind us now. Tress and Kiddo came back late Saturday night. They arrived just before midnight. I had filled up a small flask with hot chocolate and they warmed themselves up with it in the car. That didn’t take a niggling thought off Tress though – she had dutifully declared, in a health card, that they have had the flu and the health personnel at the airport suggested Tress had to be home quarantined for 7 days.

Obviously we thought that was unbelievably stupid. The irrational fear and reaction, emanating probably from uninformed staff, was most frustrating. Tress had just come off 7 days of home quarantine and she has just been told she needs to be quarantined again for another 7. I told the health personnel this was just unbelievable – a euphemism for stupid. It probably wasn’t fair on them but it has been so stressful and frustrating for us.

On the way home, I told Tress to just ignore it. That wasn’t her. As we only went to bed close to 3am the night before, we all slept in and missed church the next day. The next day she called up a couple of people, including Nurse-On-Call. Everyone told her the home quarantine wasn’t necessary. To take our minds off all this we took a drive and went to Brighton beach for some wonderful fresh air. When we came back someone from the airport called and told Tress she wasn’t required to be quarantined anymore. Her relief was almost palpable.

After a home cooked soupy dinner we went to bed early. My test results weren’t available yet so I was asked to work from home. I dropped Tress and kiddo off at the train station, went home and fired up the laptop. About an hour later the HR head emailed to say I could go in since the infectious period is well and truly over. It was too late to find a parking spot in the train station so I drove in. Work was good. It was just good to resume normal activities again.

I left early to get to the doctor again, for the test result. “Influenza A detected”. That’s “Swine Flu”, I told the blighter for a doctor who didn’t seem to know.