Well, you already know that Mi Pequeña Niña had an incident earlier this week. Apparently she was not meant to be alone in sickness, and on Friday night, I got to join in the fun.
That is, if you can call running to a nearby toilet every 15 minutes for nearly four hours “fun”.
Near as Alex and I can figure, it’s food poisoning. I don’t have the same problems MPN does (regurgitation is one thing, but she hasn’t experienced emissions from the other end in remotely the (relative) quantities. Nor the excrutiating pain of gas build-up (if she did, I imagine she’d have been screaming most of the last week).
What started it, I don’t know. I lay blame on my lunch on Friday, as that was the last thing to come back out of me (sorry, probably a detail you didn’t need to know). Out the other end was a concoction that didn’t seem even remotely possible for a human. Think “skunk”. I kid you not.
By 4:30 Saturday morning, things had calmed down enough that I could try relax, even a bit. Not that it really helped. I had ejected myself from bed at about 1:15 when I felt it first set in, as not to subject Alex to the noise, smell, or constant disturbing as I had to quickly run up and dash to the toilet. (I became intimately aquainted with that toilet as a result. I now call her “Agnes”.) The couches we have aren’t exactly the most comfortable (oh, how I regret having given up the couch we had in Calgary!) and are definitely not the best when one is being below the weather.
When Alex finally got up in the morning, I transferred to bed to attempt to sleep (having only rested maybe 30 minutes since I left bed earlier that morning), only to find rest completely useless until after 8:30 — the first time I felt I could actually drink something without fear of it coming back up again. Thus began an entire day of moving back and forth between bed and toilet, drinking my weight in Gatorade (my previous bout with food poisoning had taught me that drinking Gatorade was a wise idea), and praying that Alex wouldn’t catch it from me.
I have yet to even touch MPN, as we have a strict “If a parent is sick, said parent doesn’t touch the kids” rule.
On Sunday, my intestines began to turn into the biological equivalent of a mad scientist’s chemistry set. I really should have recorded all the burbling going on in there — I simply could not believe what was going on. My head was swimming a lot, too. The lower half of my torso was not cooperating with me one bit. I was producing enough gas to power San José for a week (much to Alex’s combine chagrin and amusement).
This morning, it was still clear that going to work would not be the wisest of moves for me, since I’m still leery about going too far from Agnes. But, thankfully, the gurgling has subsided, my hunger has (finally) returned and the mere thought food doesn’t make me wanna yarf.
A step in the right direction … namely away from Agnes (sorry honey, but it’s just not meant to be).
