Sick

Despite the mild winter, or perhaps because of it, I've been living in a sick ward for the last few weeks.

Everybody has had some sort of cold/cough/chest congestion/phlegm in that period. That's fine; I can deal with that, and everybody else, while perturbed at all the hacking and nose-blowing, was OK with it, too.

But then Amelia's congestion turned into an ear infection, and since that time, things have tipped toward the dark side.

After a week's worth of amoxicillin, the poor girl developed a rash. First her ears got red and swelled up. Then the next day, she had red, itchy patches on her elbows, knees, lower legs, race, chest, back and feet. We treated her with a few different kinds of cream, in addition to Benadryl, and hoped for the best.

Then, after two days of Benadryl and cream, she threw up. The next day, she was feeling OK. But then two days after her initial puke, she yakked again. And of course, both times were at night, in her bed, all over everything.

I took her to the doctor to see about making her rash better, and was told she had the worse of two types of amoxicillin rashes, the kind that takes a few weeks to go away. We were told to try oatmeal baths, which helped a bit.

Needless to say, she missed preschool last week. Just when it seemed things were getting better, she threw up Saturday night, once again a few hours after she'd been in bed, thus resulting in a mess on her bed and rug. To make matters worse, after I finished cleaning everything up (while Beth cleaned up Amelia and got her back to sleep), I felt a big oogie. Ended up with my second round of diarrhea of the week (oh, did I forget to mention that?).

After three puking incidents in one week, Beth and I finally realized that the last meal Amelia had prior to each barf was tomato-based: soup one night, pasta sauce the other two. Needless to say, she's off tomato-based foods for a while.

So of course wouldn't you know that once we figure out how to (potentially) stop Amelia from puking, Sunday morning Owen gets the barf bug. He threw up two or three times during the day, and spent Monday in recovery/paranoia mode. But Amelia was fine.

Yes, you can see where this is going. Beth didn't sleep well Monday night, and by early Tuesday morning she was tossing her cookies. The bug knocked her out all that day and much of Wednesday. But at least the kids were fine.

As of right now (Thursday at 9:00 a.m.) I'm fine. My theory is that my irritable bowel syndrome, which has flared up in recent days, is keeping the stomach bug at bay. "You think you can come in here with your fancy germs and take over this digestive tract? I don't think so, bug. Now bugger off!"

Beth's back at work today, neither of the kids has thrown up in several days and with any luck we're on the road to collective well being.

As your reward for making it through this post without getting sick, is this: