Woes From the Sick Ward

I honestly thought I was getting the bug this morning. Stomach pains whenever I ate anything. But so far, so good. I think I have more mental issues than anything else, but we knew that - no need to elaborate.

Drew was the first to be hit on Tuesday, Ethan followed Saturday afternoon, Trent on Saturday night when we found him sleeping in a puddle of his own vomit, and Cameron succumbed around noon today. (Sunday) You should smell our house. Whew! That's what vomit and diarrhea for 6 days times four kids will do. Blame the laundry pile. Andrew and I have nothing to wear because we can't get past the sick laundry long enough to get the regular done.

Ethan asked his Dad and Grandpa to give him a blessing last night, so he's actually felt great all day. I can't get him to tell me what's going on in the bathroom, and he's so modest that I can't bring myself barge in on him to inspect the contents of the toilet when he's done. He goes off to school tomorrow.

Cameron seems to be on the mend. We're going on seven hours with no vomit, and he learned the valuable lesson today that when you have the stomach flu, you should never trust a fart. He will be staying home tomorrow to give him 24 hours sans vomit before chucking him back into the world.

Trent is past the worst of it and just needs to overcome the diaper filling issues. He is eating, sleeping and acting normally otherwise. Thank goodness.

Drew is still my problem child. Always making things exciting. We haven't had any vomit from him since Thursday, but he continues to have diarrhea. About four or five times a day we are alerted to it's reappearance by the stench, and his poor, little bottom is speckled from cheek to cheek, top to bottom with the red bumps of a nasty rash. All that acidity had to catch up to him eventually. Baby powder is working best to combat that. The real issue with Drew is his appetite. All day today he ate one bowl of soup and half a slice of toast. That is it. I tried everything else from pizza to crackers to MnM's to bananas and the kid will not eat. I actually stuck him on the scale today to make sure he still registered. So I'm pushing the liquids, but Drew will only drink Sprite. Figures, huh? Very little water, no milk (which is probably a good thing), no juice, not even popsicles. So he's had two or three cans of soda today. I have no desire for this child to turn into me, so the kids don't get soda very often at all. But since I'm trying to keep him hydrated, I'm pretty much letting him have anything he will drink. If Sprite is it, then that's better than nothing. But if he thinks that that is going to continue after the diarrhea clears up, then he has a rude awakening coming his way.

Seriously hoping that this will be the last posting about any kind of excretions for a long, long time.

Take that, Burton.

Yesterday Cameron called from school and told me that he was sick and needed to come home. I talked to the school secretary and she confirmed that she thought he ought to be picked up. Well, I had 2 sick toddlers and no car, so my mom took a break from work and collected both my older boys from school. That way, I wouldn't have to walk with the sick-o's to pick Ethan up later, either.

Turns out that Cameron's cold was so mild that I would never have thought he needed to come home. But, obviously the school thinks that any child with the sniffles should be kept home. So I kept them home again today. For no reason other than it is colder than a mother-in-law's kiss out there, and we wouldn't want anyone to go from sniffles to full on sneezing, now, would we?

We're enjoying our Christmas Vacation preview.

Making the rounds...

Drew now has a fever of 102.7. It hit FAST. An hour ago he was running around outside giggling and chasing his brothers. Half hour later he had fallen asleep on the couch and there was steam rising off his forehead.

So glad he doesn't know what he'll be missing tonight.

Keeping fingers crossed that Cameron and Ethan don't get hit in the next 12 hours...

Gehst du zu erbrechen?

Germs and illness have been on our minds pretty much constantly for 3 days now. I'm dreading the possibility of one of my older boys catching Trent's flu, because worse even than the prospect of vomiting or death is being too sick to go trick-or-treating. Can you imagine the horror? Waiting all year to greedily gather up chocolate and lollipops from the neighbors, and then being forced to lay on the couch and drink apple juice instead? Nightmarish.

So last night, after depositing Trent at home and drugging him up with his meds, I had to go run an errand. Well, I hate to go anywhere alone, (thus the fear of dying, but that's another story), so I bribed Ethan to come with me by promising him a soda from McDonalds. That boy is a sucker for the adult treats, and also anything that he gets and his brothers don't. That's why we hide the Reisens and only eat them when the kids are in bed.

So off we went to complete our errand. We pulled up to the McDonalds drive-thru and collected our drinks. As I was leaving the parking lot, Ethan sneezed three times. Normally, I wouldn't have thought twice about it, but in my Halloween vs. Swine Flu paranoia, I immediately assumed that we were about to embark on a month long tour of duty through Influenzaland as the virus spread slowly and deliberately through each and every one of my family members.

When Ethan had finished achoo-ing, I asked him if he felt alright.

"Yeah," he said with his trademark nonchalance, "I've been blessing at school for a few days, but I'm fine."

That nearly became the second time this month that I shot soda through my delicate nasal passages.

Nothing like a good laugh at your child's ignorance. I mean innocence. Once I got my giggles under control, I clued Ethan in to the fact that it's called "sneezing", not "blessing". Now we're going to start saying, "Gesundheit" after a person sneezes, just because I like the idea of a very confused bilingual child.

Verdict

So maybe it's a good thing that the idiot doctor from this morning never showed up for our appointment, because if he's not bright enough to call when he's going to be late, (or really, really late, or just not go in at all), he might not have been bright enough to catch that Trent has both a double ear infection and H1N1 flu.

I would love to know how on Earth he caught the flu when he's hardly been in public and no one in our family has it. But, I suppose the tests don't lie.

Trent is feeling pretty cruddy, but it's not as bad as it might sound. He's got a wicked fever and isn't eating much, but other than that, he's good so far. He likes to be right with me and is getting held enough to ensure that he's thoroughly spoiled and will need to be broken of that habit when he's better. He's on amoxicillan, (however you spell that), and Tamaflu, with shots of Tylenol every four hours. I should be alternating that with Motrin and giving it every 3 hours, but I forgot to pick that up when I was running from pharmacy to pharmacy looking for one that had Tamaflu.

So there you have it. We're going to be loving up on Trent a lot for a few days, and praying all the while that the other boys don't catch his flu. (Including Bryan.)

Here's hoping that you and yours stay healthy!

"Excuse my moaning, I'm just experimenting with my vocal cords."

I was determined to have a productive day. Andrew was home, as it was his day off, and I had just put the babies down for their morning naps. Time to get the weeding done. I headed outside and began plucking the invasive little buggers from the miles of ridiculous landscaping in my yard. I filled several buckets, got very sweaty, and eventually finished voiding the backyard of weeds. Okay, most of the backyard. It was right about then that I forced back a surprise attack of nausea and then went inside to see if Andrew was planning on mowing the grass before the thermometer outside broke the ninety-five degree mark. Andrew was asleep in the recliner. Can't blame the guy - it was his day off. As I sank onto the couch with a bout of weakness, Andrew got up and went to tackle the mowing. That was about the last helpful thing he did that day.

Now let me pause here and state that I am in no way about to bash my husband. This is not a rant - it is a story of enlightenment. In order to convey my point, however, Dear Andrew will have to suffer much humiliation.

As the day progressed, I became more out of sorts; suffering with stomach cramps and body aches. By the time my sister came to pick up her son at 5:30 I was pretty well unable to get off the couch, but I did anyway since Andrew had gone to take a nap half an hour earlier. Yes, shameful, I know. I had thought that I had made it very clear that I might have had the flu, and could very well die an ugly, painful death...but Andrew was still able to sleep like a baby for three hours.

When Andrew emerged from the bedroom at 8:00 that night, I was trying to get Trent's diaper fastened before I passed out, (which I never actually did), while Drew climbed all over me, but I had not the strength to shove him off. Finally, with diapers changed and Drew distracted with a book, I fell back onto the couch exhausted and moaning. I admit that I made a few of those moans a little louder than they needed to be in hopes of attracting some attention and sympathy from the man who is supposed to be my companion in life through thick and thin. I was desperate. He took no notice.

An hour later I had cleaned up spilled Kool-Aid from the kitchen floor, gotten Drew a snack, put him to bed and coerced Cameron and Ethan into showers and then pajamas. I felt like I had been beaten repeatedly with a baseball bat while simultaneously being stabbed in the stomach with a meat fork. So I crashed on the couch again for a little more whimpering, and I threw in a tear or two for good measure. All of it was quite unintentional that time, though. I lay there longing for a drink of water, but was too sick to get up again. I yearned to throw up, but I had no place to do it and certainly couldn't make it to the toilet.

Finally! Finally! Andrew tore his eyes from ESPN and said to me, "You're acting like your on your death bed. Can I get you something?"

Here, believe it or not, is where the enlightenment occured.

He had no idea that I was as ill as I was. He has long accused me of being a drama queen, but it dawned on me at that moment that he does not know what it looks like to be sick! When Andrew gets a cold, he sleeps for three days and wakes up feeling dandy. Andrew rarely gets the flu, but when he does, he sleeps for three days and is fine. Never has he had to suffer through his daily responsibilities while being on the verge of death. He has never had to cook food for someone even though the smell of it makes him gag. Children have never climbed all over him while he lay completely vulnerable on the couch. And not once has he had to wipe up sticky juice from a floor while wondering if anyone will hear should he happen to collapse into the puddle.

Realization that my husband had never been taught how to care for someone who is ill washed away all resentment. How could I expect him to know how I felt if he had no idea what it was like to be sick and not sleeping it off in a quiet room? Now, I have played nurse maid to Andrew many times, but if a person is not instructed in this art, they cannot be expected to obsorb all the required knowledge by receiving good care when they are ailing. Especially if said person is a man. They would be feeling terrible and should concentrate on getting well, not learning the trade by example.

My sweet husband would have been very helpful, had I told him that I was very sick and could not take care of the kids. I could have told him that they needed to be fed and bathed and put to bed, and that I was going to bed then and there. Without a doubt, he would have been fine with that. Stupid as I was, I expected him to know all those things just by listening to my moans and watching me hold on to doorways when I walked. I did not look sick to him, because sick, to him, looks like someone sleeping for hours on end in a dark room in the middle of the day.

Then and there I knew that in order for my sons to stay married to their future wives and not come back home as thirty-year-old men wondering what more they possibly could have done to please their spouses, I must teach them how to take care of the ill. We do spend so much time teaching our children how to tie their shoes, clean a toilet, do their homework, read, be nice to their friends, tidy their rooms and say their prayers; why has it not occured to me to teach mine compassion? Maybe I assumed it was just something a person acquired through experience. But when a person is sick, we, as mothers, quarentine them to prevent spreading the illness. We fuss over them as any loving mother would. We do our duty quietly and without complaint. And therefore, we rob the rest of our family of the opportunity to learn how to nurse someone back to health. (Or maybe it's just me.)

Having experienced my twenty-four hour bug in this way, I have resolved that the next time a member of my family gets sick, one of my healthy children AND MY HUSBAND will be assisting me in making sure that the patient is comfortable, gets the rest that they need, is not bothered by other family members, eats, (if they can), meals that are brought to them, and has everything they might need. Next time I am sick, I will expect the same to be done for me. And I have no doubt that with a little instruction, Andrew will rise to the occasion.