by Cathy
NOTE: This post was dangerously close to being called The Farts and the Pimps. You have S, Patti's daughter, to thank for the much more refined title above. :-)
I also thought this to be scary enough to merit a Halloween day post.
Happy Halloween!!
One of the many Sour Grapes listed on our homepage is "The Collapse of the Universe When a Man Gets Sick". I'd like to clarify: this refers to the collapse of the universe inside said man's head. The actual, entire universe literally collapsing? That is what happens when a woman (the wife, mom, homemaker and CEO of any household) gets sick.
But what happens when both parents get sick? At the same time? That my dear readers, is fodder worthy of a blog post.
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| A scary situation (and sight) |
Several weeks ago, I contracted what was some form of the stomach flu by way of having my seven-year old vomit all over everything in our king-size bed. (This in itself? A post for another time.) I say "some form" because this virus was unlike any other stomach flu virus I've had, which usually lasts 24 hours and done. My kid had a fever after her initial vomit attack and was out for a day or two with occasional diarrhea.
Me? No vomiting, and aggressive nausea and pains in my stomach that led to nowhere except one horrific episode of diarrhea whereby my extremities stiffened and froze up rigor-mortis style, my guess, due to dehydration. As frightening as that was, what came next was even worse and completely unexpected: a rash of tiny red bumps that exploded all over my arms and legs with a spattering on my torso and back, that itched like a mother and lasted four days.
After several frantic Google searches and calls to family, I discovered that apparently it's completely normal for a virus to expel itself from your system via a rash. Since I had no vomiting and very little diarrhea, the rash is what my body went to. And me? I went crazy.
My husband had to step-up and basically take over all of my household tasks. He washed dishes (he wasn't sure how to load the dishwasher), he packed lunches (and included a hand-written note in each bag, and "Moooom...how come you never do that??"), he packed snacks (he plopped an entire peanut-encrusted taffy apple, still in the packaging, into my second grader's snack bag to be brought into a classroom with nut allergies galore), he cooked frozen foods for the kids and did the best he could....considering...that the flu virus was creeping its way into his system.
"I'm fading," he moaned as he came into the bedroom where I was breathing heavy with stomach pains. I was half munching on Saltines and looked like death warmed over. He fell onto the bed in shivers and began trying to psyche himself out. "It's all in your head," he murmured between gasps. "You're fine." But he wasn't, God bless his delusional soul. He was being hit by yet another version of this chameleon-like virus/monster that entered our home. And we both knew it was taking over.
For two days, we shuffled around the house burping, expelling gas, sipping Coke or some other carbonated drink. We looked (and felt) like zombies: me, pimply-rashed and hunched over in nausea, shivering from the urge to resist scratching my skin off, and he, holding himself through fits of chills and fever. We bumped mindlessly into one another, taking turns quasi-tackling the necessary everyday tasks, tossing coins for who was going to chauffeur the kids to and fro school or pack lunches (I'm really not sure what the kids ate those couple of days), overextending our very necessary bathroom visits as a form of exhausted escapism and crawling under the bed covers in hopes the other wouldn't notice. It was a nightmare to say the least and brought to mind the dreadful conundrum of parenthood: How do you take care of your kids when you cannot take care of yourself?
Somehow, as all parents do, we literally muddled through it and came out on the other side. No physical scars remain yet the emotional scars we all endured as a family will be with us always - and that is more frightening than All Hallows Eve.
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| Mwuah ha ha ha ha!!! |
