Sick Family Robinson

As alluded to in my previous post, this kid's been illin' for the past week, and it hasn't been a lonely experience. Eliza's nose has been running nonstop for weeks, and she's the healthiest person in the family.

It all started way back when, in a simpler time, on a day called Thursday the 17th. Max came home early from school, and I came home early from work to be with him (Cathleen had to leave to attend to an emergency that mercifully turned out not to be emergent). I took Max's temperature, he had a fever of at least 101.7, and he was asleep in bed by 5:30. By the next morning his fever was gone.

Saturday night Cathleen and I went out to the movies (There Will Be Blood -- Daniel Day Lewis, as advertised, was brilliant and he will no doubt win the Oscar, but the last 20 minutes of the movie had me shaking my head...I get the entire point of the movie, but Plainview's descent into a farcical monster at the end was, pacewise, such a radical departure from the rest of the movie that it left a bad taste in my mouth.). We were supposed to go out to dinner too, but we went straight home because Cathleen wasn't feeling well. By later that night she had a fever which didn't fully disappear for another three days.

I took the kids myself to Alani's fourth birthday party on Sunday while Cathleen remained at home in bed. She almost never gets sick and so I was surprised that she would be this sick and yet I, the pale, wan sickly kid, would have emerged unscathed. By nightfall on Monday, however, I was registering 101.7 on the thermometer.

I had a fever. Cathleen had a fever. This situation was further complicated by the fact that we didn't have heat in our apartment that day either. Our apartment and Sophie and Joseph's apartment were both without heat; the basement and the first floor had heat. Our plumbers quickly diagnosed the problem as frozen pipes! They spent about 40 minutes applying a blowtorch to the heating pipes in the bedrooms in our apartment before giving up on it for the day. They would return on Tuesday with their pipe-thawing equipment (which was in use on another job). We put an electric heater in the kids room, and buried our fevered selves under our comforter. Mercifully, the plumbers got the heat back on by midday Tuesday and, because Cathleen and I were both passed out in our bed when their work was done, we temporarily cut out on the $650 repair bill!

Beyond the fever, and an I-feel-like-I've-been-run-over-by-a-truck feeling, I was also experiencing these really severe stomach cramps any time I put solid food into my stomach -- so severe that I was feeling it in my back, as if I was having back labor. So bizarre, the way my GI tract just throws up a white flag anytime the least bit of trouble presents itself to the rest of my body. In any event, I'm sick as a dog, and basically not eating food for three straight days. And Cathleen is sick. And there's these two little kids running around in our apartment with this expectation that we're still going to parent them! Fortunately we had babysitting for Eliza during the days, at which time Max was also in school. Cathleen and I were literally tag-teaming it on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, with one of us passed out in the bedroom for an hour and the other tending to the kids, and then swapping when circumstances demanded it. On Wednesday, as my fever was subsiding, my nose turned into a faucet; even though it hadn't been runny at all for the previous two days, now it was so leaky that at times I couldn't get a tissue up there fast enough. It was like I had some freakishly mutating plague.

Fortunately, Cathleen mended sufficiently by Thursday that she could carry the load, and by Friday (my fourth straight day of missing work...I have no idea when I last did that, not even when I had two surgeries within six days of each other back in '04) I was able to contribute significantly, largely abetted by the fact that I ate my first actual meal that day. Today I'm feeling closer to normal, though I've got a cough and my stomach doesn't quite feel 100%. Cathleen has a seriously badass cough, reminiscent of one she couldn't shake for weeks a couple of years ago.

All the while, we've mused that Max had escaped with one night of fever, and here we were with something approximating the flu. Tonight Max had a slight fever and he threw up in his sleep, the poor thing.

I wish that there was something a bit deeper or more philosophical about this blog entry, but there isn't. We are some sad specimens in these parts.