Dr. Maya Moody treats flu-infected children daily during one of the worst flu outbreaks in the past 15 years.

Most will recover with rest, plenty of fluids, and medications to treat their symptoms. But some are suffering serious complications from the flu.

“I have a very, very, very sick 4-year-old patient in the hospital,” she said. The young girl has been hospitalized for nearly a month -- at times on a ventilator -- with four tubes placed in her chest for drainage.

“She’s been in the pediatric ICU with recurrent secondary pneumonia to the point that it’s rotting her lungs,” Moody said. Moody is the immediate past president of the Missouri Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and practices at Mercy Hospital in St. Louis. Her 4-year-old patient was not vaccinated for influenza because her parents wanted to spare her the pain of the needle prick.

“It breaks your heart because it could have been prevented,” Moody said.

Doctors say it’s not too late to get the vaccine to help prevent or lessen the severity of the flu, which has led to at least 310,000 hospitalizations and 13,000 deaths -- including at least 57 children -- so far this season.

Moody is seeing more patients with secondary bacterial infections after catching the influenza virus. They are coming back with a new fever, ear infection or pneumonia, she said.

“It’s not just influenza,” she said. “There’s still some RSV and a little bit of COVID sprinkled in there.”

In many states, including Missouri, flu numbers are still rising.

Dr. Steven Lawrence, an infectious disease specialist with Washington University School of Medicine, says there are a few possible reasons why flu cases are so high this season. During the first COVID year, with many people isolating at home, there was very little flu exposure. When there are years of fewer than normal flu cases, it can lower immunity on a population level. Additionally, in December, the CDC stated that fewer children had gotten the flu vaccine than the previous year -- in fact, it was the lowest rate in 12 years.

That combination of lower population immunity and lower vaccination rates may have contributed to the staggering spread this season.

Unfortunately, public trust in vaccines has been eroding in recent years. There’s an outbreak of measles in Texas right now, and whooping cough has made a comeback in Idaho. Idaho bears the distinction of being the first place a regional health district banned public clinics from giving people the COVID vaccine -- a vaccine that saved countless lives during the pandemic.

Speaking of COVID, one of the ways to protect yourself from the rampant flu virus is by wearing a mask when you have to be in an enclosed area indoors with other people.

Basic hygiene protocol still applies: Cover your mouth when you cough, wash your hands frequently, clean high-touch areas often, avoid touching your face, and wear a mask if you have symptoms.

Those who are at increased risk for complications, such as very young children and older adults, or those with underlying health conditions, need to prioritize getting vaccinated. Even when the number of cases starts to decline, doctors say they expect to see the flu continue to circulate for another month or so.

Most parents want to do whatever they can to keep their children safe. With all the conflicting information circulating about vaccines, it’s worthwhile to think about who you call when your child gets sick.

If you trust your pediatrician when you are worried about a child spiking a fever for days or experiencing prolonged pain or throwing up uncontrollably, then ask them whether they recommend getting the flu vaccine.

Then, take that advice.

Two years after Jack Dorsey and his buddies launched Twitter in 2006, I reluctantly joined the site.

We were encouraged to start tweeting by a former editor who saw the microblogging social media app as a way to reach new audiences. At first, it seemed odd to share fleeting thoughts and observations with strangers. But journalists, politicians and activists from around the world started showing up. They attracted more people who wanted to learn and share interesting things. It was a text-based site, so it drew the word nerds and news junkies.

These were my people.

I started spending big cultural moments -- sports championships, annual awards ceremonies and breaking news events -- with the Twitter community.

Logging into Twitter felt like stopping by a witty cocktail party. The site became the first thing I looked at in the morning to see what was trending and the last thing I looked at before going to bed. I discovered story ideas and found sources on it. Over the course of 16 years, posting on it became a daily habit -- even when the party wasn’t as entertaining anymore. Trolls and bots and propagandists infiltrated, and the rhetoric turned uglier.

In 2022, billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion.

I worried that it was the beginning of the end for the one social media site that felt indispensable. I naively hoped Musk’s desire to protect his financial interests would prevent him from ruining the place. Dorsey even tweeted that Musk was the “singular solution I trust” to fix Twitter.

I was wrong, and so was Dorsey.

Musk’s decisions degraded the reliability of information on the site, and it became rampant with hate speech and far-right trolls. Still, I kept my account on his rebranded X. I had curated a list of 1,000 people I followed and had more than 25,000 followers -- not a massive platform, but a well-connected one.

But I started looking for a new place for online conversations.

The easiest way to break a bad habit is to replace it with a better one. When an open-source social media site, Bluesky, also started by Dorsey, began gaining traction, I decided to check it out. People there were posting about issues in a thoughtful way and sharing news links I wanted to read.

My interest in checking X dropped to glancing at it once a week or so. I felt less agitated first thing in the morning and slept better at night. I was finally implementing a change in my own life that I had preached to my children for all of theirs: Spend less time looking at screens and more time in the real world.

Dorsey left the board of Bluesky and described X as “freedom technology.”

It doesn’t look like freedom to support a king.

The past few weeks have changed the way I view participation on X.

Musk, the world’s richest man and a private citizen, has amassed an unprecedented amount of power in the federal government. None of us ever voted for Musk, who grew up in a wealthy family in apartheid South Africa, for any elected office. But he’s now acting as America’s co-president, with access to all our information in the U.S. Treasury and the ability to shut down congressionally appropriated programs like USAID, scrub government websites of public data and dismiss civil servants without cause.

Musk, a “special government employee” who could become the world’s first trillionaire by 2027, directly benefits from billions in contracts with the U.S. government. (Those contracts are paid by our tax dollars.)

Musk wanted Twitter for its ability to influence. He’s gotten more than his money’s worth.

I finally requested and downloaded an archive of my data from X. I’m using Cyd, a free desktop app, to delete more than 26,000 old tweets. I’ve made my account private. I might occasionally retweet posts that I think should be amplified, but I have no desire to post on the site of a billionaire who is tearing apart our country and its Constitution while growing his fortune with our tax dollars.

For nearly 17 years, I created free content for a company whose owners have made billions from our personal information, thoughts and analysis.

Leaving it behind was easier than I expected.

Frankie was racing down the small hill in the backyard when he yelped and lifted his hind leg close to his body.

The first time my 16-pound cotton ball of a pup yipped in pain and started limping, I rushed him to the vet. It turned out he has a luxating patella -- basically a trick knee.

I learned to pop his knee back into place when it slips out of the socket and give him an anti-inflammatory pill. Normally, he would be back to his goofy self in a couple of hours.

This time, Frankie didn’t bounce back.

I carried him around until it was time for his appointment. The vet held Frankie’s chicken-bone sized joint between his fingers and showed me how his tibia slid forward in a way it shouldn’t. Frankie had torn his cranial cruciate ligament (CCL), which connects the thigh bone to the shin bone -- the equivalent of the ACL in humans. It’s a fairly common injury in active dogs and certain breeds.

The vet said the knee could eventually recover on its own, but dogs typically had better long-term outcomes if they got a surgical repair. This knee surgery can cost anywhere from $2,500 to $5,000.

Given that I had spent my entire childhood uninsured, I never got insurance for Frankie. It seemed like a peculiar luxury to purchase health insurance for a dog when 26 million Americans are uninsured.

Maybe that was a bad decision.

Just like Frankie’s ligament, I was also torn. I didn’t want to subject him to an unnecessary surgery, not to mention a recovery that required weeks of inactivity. The operation's cost was also a concern: We are still paying for two children in college. But I also didn’t want him to develop painful arthritis or bone spurs later in life.

He was 6 at the time, and could live another decade.

I told the vet I would think it over.

Frankie is a Coton du Tulear, so I asked other owners of Cotons in a Facebook group if they had opted for surgery after a similar injury. Half of those who responded advised getting the surgery; the other half said to let it heal on its own. When I asked my dog-owning friends, half of them said their dogs had also torn their knee ligaments.

The CCL repair is the most common orthopedic surgery for dogs -- partly because dogs are living longer than in the past and partly because more pet owners have insurance, or are willing to pay for the surgery.

Frankie is my first dog, and I’ve already spent way more on him than I could have ever imagined spending on an animal -- from grooming to boarding to day camp to training to an endless supply of treats and toys.

For the next month, I tried every home remedy mentioned on Al Gore’s internet. I fed Frankie homemade bone broth and fresh chicken at each meal. I gave him glucosamine supplements. I used red light therapy on his knee. I massaged his limbs and carried him everywhere.

He was not averse to any of this. He was able to walk without pain, although his gait looked a little off. But during one of our short walks, I heard a clicking coming from his knee. Probably a meniscus tear, the internet informed me.

I called and scheduled Frankie’s surgery.

I was a wreck the day of the procedure. Afterward, the vet’s staff assured me it went well and sent me home with pages of post-surgical care notes. Frankie was groggy and whined in pain later that evening.

Maybe I had made a big mistake.

Friends assured me that the first week of recovery was the worst. Their dogs got substantially better week by week. I continued to pamper Frankie.

He watched DogTV videos on YouTube. I bought baby gates to contain him to a single room downstairs, and enrichment toys to keep his brain occupied.

I could never have anticipated how much attention and nurturing I could devote to a pet. To be honest, Frankie acts a lot more like a toddler than a dog. In a parallel universe -- where day care and college didn’t cost so much -- I’m sure we would have had more children. Instead, Frankie, who has no post-graduate plans, is my third child.

It’s been three months since he tore his knee. He’s running around the backyard again. He can hop up on the couch. I’ve kept up with his joint supplements, the fresh boiled chicken on top of his kibble and gentle stretching exercises in the morning.

Occasionally, I can still hear his knee click when we go for a walk, so I still wonder if the surgery will be worth it for him in the long run.

But knowing that I’ve done everything I can for him is absolutely worth it.