I came home from a Christmas dinner two weeks ago convinced I had contracted food poisoning. One of the restaurant’s dinner specials was pasta with shrimp, which Susan and I both ordered. Thing is, she doesn’t eat shrimp, so she ordered her shrimp on the side and I ate it, along with mine. By the time we got home, my stomach was all rumbly-tumbly and I was sure the shrimp was the culprit.
In retrospect, I don’t believe it was. A few days prior to that dinner, Susan had gone to the doctor complaining of a sore throat and was diagnosed with strep. The thing was, it was only her throat that hurt, not her stomach. By the end of the weekend, I had two ailments — an upset stomach combined with a throat of fire. I took two days off of work and didn’t enjoy a single minute of it. By Wednesday I felt good enough to return to work, and a few days after that, Susan got the stomach bug. So, looking back, it seems like she had two different things (the strep throat and the stomach bug) a week apart, and somehow I caught them both at the same time. Which was miserable.
The stomach bug hit Susan hard on Sunday, approximately eight hours before she was scheduled to get on a plane and head to Washington D.C. for work. So now she’s there, and sick, and today Mason came home with all the same symptoms. A trip to the Mercy after hours clinic returned negative results for strep and/or the flu, which is good news. The doctor suggested Ibuprofen and DayQuil.
When we checked Mason in at the clinic, the nurse started to hand me a clipboard, pulled it back, and then commented, “Oh… he’s an adult now.” (Yes, legally — for five days now.) So instead of the normal procedure, Mason had to fill out some new paperwork himself and provide a copy of his license along with his social security number. “You would be surprised how few 18-year-olds carry their driver’s licenses and know their social security numbers,” she said.
So, Susan’s chugging Pepto in D.C., Mason had a dose of DayQuil, I just popped another round of sinus pills and Ibuprofen, and Morgan, if she knows what’s good for her, is pushing blankets up against her bedroom door to keep the germs away.