In fact, it's kind of a wonder that I haven't already had an enormous hole dug under my garage to fill with one of those overlarge doomsday bunker types, complete with dozens of jugs of water and 300 cans of spam. In fact, to listen to the news, we're pretty sure the Zombie apocalypse will be breaking out any day now.
Everybody is sick. Sick, sick, sick.
As far as I'm concerned, the entire world is breaking out in mysterious fever, and green snot flows rampant in the streets. If you haven't heard, you'll probably want to panic now.
In our house, Logan was the first to go down with a fever and a cough. He was lucky; he got antibiotics on account of an ear infection. Unfortunately, he took me down pretty quickly after that, and I get no assistance.
I have to admit, I've been sick during the first trimester of each of my pregnancies. To the advice of no one, I got H1N1 with Leah after being told sagely by every doctor and several random bystanders, just don't get H1N1! Whatever you do! Otherwise the space-time continuum will collapse and the world as we know it will be over! (As if any teacher is capable of "just not getting" whatever her snotty little students have. I'll get right on that. For the record? A little Tamiflu and everything was fine, poo-poo to those catastrophic H1N1-is-the-end-of-the-world predictions.)
With Logan, I had the stomach flu, which was exactly as fun as you'd imagine. It's okay, it's just morning sickness. On steroids.
Second to the stomach flu, though, this was was the worst. I didn't have a fever, but I felt absolutely miserable. I could hardly get out of bed and walk downstairs, it was rough.
Just as I thought we were in the clear, Miss Leah got it too. First the cough. Then the fever. And then things really started going south. When we took her to the doctor, they were unsure about the possibility that it might have turned into pneumonia. She had two nights where she couldn't sleep at all because her cough was so persistent and miserable; by the third night, I watched her sleep and her labored breath, interrupted by violent coughing spasms and decided she was really in big trouble.
We're lucky that there's a Children's Hospital just a few miles from our house. We brought her in, which is a blessing and a curse all in one. Because, once you get into the hospital, it's not always easy to get out again.
It has been so hard to watch my sweet little girl sit in that big hospital bed and have to endure all kinds of things that are weird and uncomfortable. It's definitely a reality check: how do people endure this long-term? How do you get through it when it's something much more serious than slightly low oxygen levels?
So, even though we've been here for two nights and Leah is getting anxious and frustrated with the situation, even though Logan has been at home without Mommy, Daddy or Sissy and I haven't seen much of him in two days, I have to say that I'm grateful for all this craziness. Grateful that we live in a time when fixing these "simple" ailments is easy and not a potential death sentence. Grateful especially that this is the first time in nearly four years that we've been to the hospital, and that we'll get to leave in a short amount of time.
All of this has been a bit surreal. I certainly appreciate how lucky we are to be able to go back to our reality, rather than having this be our reality.
And maybe that doomsday bunker isn't such a bad idea after all. Spam, though... that's never going to be a winner.
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