It’s amazing how quickly your day can change. Sunday afternoon, Adam took Keira swimming. By 6.00pm, she was flushed in the cheeks, begging to be put to bed. As I did, her stomach unmistakably gurgled as she belched up a foul cloud of impending doom.
I barely managed to get her to the toilet before the vomit came. And by came I mean: plastered the wall and all surrounds.
Later, after we’d put her down again, she called out and her entire bed, her hair, her eyes, ears were smeared in vomit.
That was about when I lost my own dinner for the first time, and the night went downhill steadily from there.
For the next nine hours or so, both my daughter and myself took turns retching into a bucket; retching food, then bile, then nothing at all as our stomach’s could not stop the purging reflex.
Miraculously, she woke up after only a few hours sleep, without much else wrong with her.
Sadly, I could not say the same.
I was in that state of abject misery I’m sure you’ve all experienced a few times in your life: you just want to retreat into that shell of yourself which is only concerned with breathing. With merely surviving.
You don’t want food, or even water. You don’t want to be touched. You certainly don’t want company, or kid’s crawling all over you. You are prepared to sleep the time away until you come back to some sort of baseline operational ability.
To do that meant my husband taking Monday off to be my nursemaid, for which I will be eternally grateful. I remember stumbling out to the living area at one point, seeing the state the household was in, but prepared to let it slide because there were four loads of vomit-covered sheets in the wash, the kids were being fed and kept happy, and he cooked tea (which no-one ate).
I still feel pretty delicate. I’m walking around afraid to touch anything; afraid that whatever mega-bug invaded my system was just lying in wait on that spoon, that book, or that doorhandle, ready to strike again. Thus random household objects will be a source of paranoia until I get better.
Further, until I rally properly, posting might be scarce – or ‘lite’ – this week.
p.s. You may wonder how I was able to post on Monday, if I was so sick. That is the beautiful thing called a future poststamp. I actually wrote it Sunday afternoon.
