When Everybody's Sick At Once
Un-fun for the whole family!
Maybe it’s the season. Maybe it’s my heightened awareness of germs. Maybe it’s the fact that the part of the country that was running as though there was a pandemic has decided fuck it and ended all pandemic restrictions over the last couple of weeks, thus enabling all of the pathogens who spent the last two years in social isolation learning how to make sourdough bread and garden to finally have a reunion orgy in our airways. Whatever the reason or combination of reasons, over the last couple of weeks, it’s seemed like everybody I know is either sick, getting sick, or just got done being sick.
And not just local Southern California friends; I’m talking people across the country, from upstate New York to the suburbs of Denver to Duluth. Single people are getting sick. Married people are getting sick. Kids are getting sick. Grandparents are getting sick.
This weekend, I got sick, which brought the total number of people in my house who were sick to everyone.
It started last week, when my husband suddenly came down with what he described as “hayfever.” I love Josh dearly and he’s brilliant in many ways, but I believe the last time that he took a science class was when he was in high school in the late 1990’s, and, I’m pretty sure he did not pay attention in that class. In contrast, I am a big fan of science– but more a hobbyist than a practitioner. If human biology were NFL football, I would be the team equipment manager, in love with the game but not built to play; Josh would be more like one of those adults who faked the stomach flu to avoid gym class and refer to all athletic activities as “sports-ball.”
So I’m not sure why I believed Josh’s self-diagnosis of this mysterious “hayfever” brought on by “allergies” which I’m now learning he based entirely on the color of his mucus, which is not a reliable way to diagnose disease. It could be that he went from laid out on the couch to almost totally recovered in two days. It could be that he tested negative for COVID. It could be that he does get laid out by allergies from time to time. Maybe I just wanted to believe that he wasn’t sick with anything that he could pass on to me. But I did. That’s on me. And now I have it. [I ran these two paragraphs by him before posting this because I’m not in the business of talking shit on my partner online without him knowing it’s all in good fun; he replied, “It might still be hayfever!”]
My part in the saga started in earnest late Friday night, and by Saturday, I was completely on my ass. My face throbbed with such sinus pain that it made me dizzy. I drank all the water and Pedialyte that could physically fit in my stomach and still felt thirsty. My nose ran like it was trying to put out a fire on my mouth. As I’m typing this, I’m feeling a little bit better, but it still feels a little like my zygomatic bones are trying to burst out of my face.
I don’t recommend getting sick in general, but I especially do not recommend getting sick if you have a baby, because babies famously do not adjust their own needs and expectations to their caretakers’ capacities. They need what they need regardless, and if they expect you to provide it and you don’t, they get pretty cranky about it, especially if they are also uncomfortable and feeling under the weather.
Juniper has been sleeping like crap, which means I have been sleeping like crap, on top of the regular crap-sleeping that comes along with having a baby that isn’t a “good sleeper” and me lacking the stomach to be a hardass about sleep training. The 24 hours of crap-sleeping means that I am even less equipped than usual to team up on handling an extra cranky 6-month-old baby than usual, and all of it is falling on Josh and Luca the dog, who thinks he is helping by following both of us around very closely at all times but almost always is not helping.
Getting sick as a family: Zero stars. Do not recommend.
Thankfully, in our case, it’s not COVID. At least, not according to several antigen tests taken across several days by both of the adults in the house. (We’ll keep testing, and I have a PCR test scheduled for tomorrow. EXCITING!). If I eventually get a positive on a COVID test, I’ll be disappointed, for both the regular reasons a person would be disappointed if they got COVID (ie- it’s a deadly disease that has killed at least a million Americans… so far, I’m asthmatic and would probably have a more difficult road ahead of me than the average person without a chronic lung disease, COVID-positive baby= no thank you) but I’d also be disappointed for a stupid reason: Josh and I have both gone this long without getting it. Ending our two-plus year streak would feel like the end of an era, like Cal Ripkin Jr. retiring. We'll have to one day tell Juniper that we coulda been contenders.
I'm also trying to brace myself for years of this. One day, we will get COVID. And COVID or not, sooner than we'd like, we'll all get sick with something again. Parenthood is nothing if not a series of firsts that become routine, and then pass away into either the attic of nostalgia or the ash heap of good riddance. Somebody picking up a germ somewhere and then spreading that germ around to the entire family seems like something every parent I know does at least once a year, sometimes twice, sometimes more-- Like taking a family vacation, but with fewer keepsake photographs and more empty Kleenex boxes.
Get well soon, everybody!
Image via Shutterstock