As the daughter of one Minneapolis firefighter and the wife of another, Linda DeLude thought she knew the dangers that her husband, Barry, faced on the job.
The flu virus didn't even make the list. Until one day in 2007.
In late January, Barry DeLude and his crew responded to a medical emergency at a nursing home. Two days later, he started feeling achy and complained of the worst headache of his life.
He was a healthy 44-year-old with two jobs, two kids and the strength of an ox. No one, least of all his wife, suspected that a bout of the flu would kill him.
"I hate the word 'flu' because it sounds so innocuous," she says now, 20 months after Barry, her high-school sweetheart, died. Looking back, Linda DeLude believes her husband could have survived if he had had a flu shot. Since then she has become something of an evangelist on the subject. "I don't want to see anybody go through what we've gone through," she said.
This fall, she joined a campaign by the American Lung Association, called "Faces of Influenza," sharing her story publicly to encourage people to get vaccinated. She is also volunteering at a flu-shot clinic starting today at a Minneapolis fire station to take the message to her late husband's friends and colleagues. Last fall, she said, "I literally chased some of his friends down the hallway" to make sure they got their shots. "I have no shame," she said. "It would just break my heart to see any of them get super sick."
Flu shots weren't even on her radar, she admits, until her husband fell ill.
She had heard the statistics: Every year, an estimated 36,000 Americans die of complications from the flu and more than 200,000 are hospitalized. But like many people, she said, she didn't take the threat personally.
