Giuliani Admitted to St. Louis Hospital
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - Republican Rudy Giuliani was admitted to a hospital Wednesday night for flu-like symptoms, his campaign said.
The former New York City mayor felt the symptoms while campaining for the Republican presidential nomination in Missouri, and they soon became worse, campaign spokeswoman Katie Levinson said. The mayor decided to go to a St. Louis hospital and spend the night there, she said.
This will hurt him. Everybody who has ever sat at home shivering and sniveling with the flu or, worse, gone to work with it because they couldn’t afford to take the time off, is thinking, “He went to the hospital for the flu?”
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IANACampaignManager, but I believe the prescribed course of treatments is supposed to be a private nurse you can pay off to be quiet, a bag of saline, and some aspirin.
I’m a chef. That’s all I got to say about that. Bill knows what I’m talking about.
I knew a line cook years ago who was so blotto with the flu that he tied himself to to his station with loops of butcher’s twine to keep himself from weaving around. He actually managed to get through service with only a few minor cuts and burns. Every now an then, he’d take a slug from the cognac bottle at his station for strength; the rest of the time he was bellowing incoherently or drunkedly singing Rock The Casbah. His service was flawless. Fainted dead away when the last plate went out. An inspiration to us young’uns.
And how many people did he infect? That’s a serious question, not a snark. I’ve got no idea of how well food transmits a flu, but there were certainly people near him. And if it was like any other kitchen I’ve seen*, it was a bit crowded.
* I’m not a chef, but I’ve washed an awful lot of dishes, and for a few months I was installing cash registers for a living.
Now, Steve, that’s what the cognac is for. Disinfectant!
He probably infected the whole damned restaurant, Steve.
But Mojo is right. Restaurant people, myself included, will got to work almost until death intervenes. I was managing the downtown Broker restaurant in Denver thirty years ago, and I came down with something. It kept getting worse and worse, and I kept ignoring it, until I just collapsed on the floor. Did they call an ambulance? Of course not. The assistant manager drove me home. I crawled into bed, slugged down a pint of brandy in about five minutes, passed out, and slept for 36 hours. When I woke up I felt fine, so I went back to work.
That sort of behavior would be considered normal in the non-chain operations I worked in.
Very valid question, Steve, and not taken as snark. I imagine he infected a lot of people, although not too many in the kitchen. The transmission was probably not through food, per se, but through contact with the plates, or the waitron, or the handle of the coffee pot out front, or boffing the hostess before the symptoms become more apparent.
But it’s a point of pride amongst good cooks that you don’t leave your station for pretty much any thing less than a traumatic amputation. Kitchens are staffed at a razor thin margin, and everyone knows that if one person is absent, the others have to pick up the slack. In the brotherhood of cooking, we are loathe, despite all logic to the contrary, to call in sick when we should, because that would mean that someone else would be left stuck with our station; letting down one’s comrades in arms, so to speak. Now, I know this sounds quaint, but it’s taken rather seriously.
Think about it: Do you ever notice mass closings of restaurants in flu season? Of course not. But think about this, also: Would those people catching the flu be more or less likely to catch it in other public circumstances? Sure, restaurants, for a variety of reasons, are ideal vectors for the transmission for diseases, but so are a myriad of other areas in life.
Hospitals, for instance.
Granted, I rarely get the flu. That’s not from getting flu shots, either, but through simple hygiene. Constant washing of hands, sanitized station and tools and - personally - no contact with others. If I meet you in the dining room of the restaurant, I will not shake your hand; I keep my hands behind me.
But you are entirely correct; kitchens are veritable labs for many nasty things, and there is a culture - pardon the pun - bred of trial-by-fire that makes the spreading of disease under the right conditions pretty much inevitable.
You’ve confirmed my suspicions, Chef. I came down with a cold several days ago - exactly 48 hours after my wife and I went out to eat.
Sorry, that was my anonymous post.
Chef/Bill
This is not at all unusual in any of the “service” type industries, I know personally of being on installations with a 102 degree fever for 18 hours straight, sleeping for about 8 hours and then being back at it for another 8 to 10 hours most of the time for service people the only excuse is that I was delayed by my funeral.