Thursday, December 2, 2004 - Thanksgiving and the Nightmare Weekend

Thanksgiving, generally speaking, was nice. My husband's family gathered at his sister's house (along with her husband's parents). Unfortunately, Ironwolf's sister came down with a stomach virus the night before. And of course, she was supposed to be the one cooking dinner (don't worry, she didn't have to do it). And, she's six months pregnant and couldn't take anything for it. And, she was in the hospital last week for premature labor that was brought on by dehydration.

And... it was her birthday. Poor thing!

Aside from that, it was a lovely gathering. But then...

Fast forward to Friday night, around 11:15 PM. The kids are in bed, and Ironwolf and I have a couple friends over to play games. Ironwolf suddenly complains that he is not feeling well and disappears into the bathroon. The friends wisely decide that we should wrap things up for the night and they take off.

A few minutes after they leave, Ironwolf is in the bathroom again, but now he's vomiting. He gets himself all cleaned up and as I help him prepare for bed, I hear it. Rascal is in his bed, crying, with himself and his bed covered in vomit. Oh, boy. It's going to be a long night.

With the both of them throwing up regularly (and Rascal every few minutes), I was concerned, so I called up our health insurance 24-hour nurse line to try to make sure it wasn't food poisoning (we'd had a pizza that night, and you never know). The nurse called us and I and Ironwolf (mostly Ironwolf, because I was tending Rascal) talked with the nurse about their symptoms. The nurse came to the preliminary conclusion that Rascal had a bowel obstruction. What?! Excuse me? That doesn't even make sense! I don't think that a bowel obstruction in my son is going to cause my husband to be sick at the same time! Duh.

Sometime during this conversation I become increasingly aware that I am not feeling so well. At first I brush it off as stress plus the late hour, but eventually I must accept reality, and indeed I was also bending down to the porcelain goddess by about 2:30 AM.

Thankfully I got Rascal to sleep shortly after that, and lay down myself for a bit, but right around 4 AM Zipper wakes up vomiting. The next couple hours are spent primarily tending to him.

As you may have surmised, we did indeed catch the stomach virus from Ironwolf's sister (as did his brother and grandmother). That pretty well shot the whole weekend, and left me with this incredible pile of bodily-fluid soaked laundry to take care of. Oh, the stench (one of the reasons why I never joined most of my family in the nursing profession)!

Zipper still has the runs from this illness, and it's worse than I've ever seen before. But he seems cheerful and is eating and drinking normally so I'm not too worried (except I can't keep him in clean clothes). The diaper rash was really bad for a while. It's improving, and I expect him to be back to normal in a day or two.

Well, that which does not kill us makes us stronger, so I guess we must be stronger for the experience!