Avoid the Plague

Warning: This post is largely about the Norovirus of Death

I am slouching here writing because I am afraid of my soup. I am slouching because I can no longer lay down without going crazy but if I sit up any further it will take much longer to catch my breath. I am also out of breath. I am out of breath because I heated up half a can of vegetable soup donated by my ever-caring neighbor, soup which I am now afraid of. It’s not exactly that I am afraid of eating the soup, it’s the re-eating that’s not so pleasant and more fear inducing. (If the thought of reeating soup makes you queasy you might want to skip to the last paragraph and save yourself some pain.)

If you would like some graphic back story, on Monday at almost exactly 1530 and without even a remote bit of warning I became violently ill in one direction and shortly proceeded to be violently ill in the other direction with little enough time in between to maintain body hydration at an even barely reasonable level. My friend Murphy was around to hold my hair back while I expulsed the contents of my stomach, which is to say that with a toilet and 2 garbage cans in front of me I managed on more than one occasion to hit none of these and had to change clothes and wash a few rugs today when I could finally stand for more than two minutes. (This also makes me out of breath.)

On a positive note I am no longer afraid of the substance that would normally make up 70% of my body and ice cubes are not the coolest and most life saving thing ever invented. I don’t need the crazy cat to wake me up every hour and a half to have a few sips of water lest I slip into unconsciousness (which he strangely, lovingly, and punctually did all Monday into Tuesday). I have conquered my fear of crackers and I will eventually try this whole soup substance. Right now I am content to glance at it cynically and suspiciously out of the corner of my eye.

I also managed to do something today that no one should really ever have to do. When you are a kid your mom or dad takes care of it and when you are in college you have a roommate and when you are old enough (but not yet smart enough) and get drunk enough there is usually someone there smarter than you or you are at someone else’s house and you sort of leave it in their shower for their mom to find and fix. I have a friend who found the rose bushes outside of the Whitehouse to be a convenient self-clean-up free location. I have cleaned up after sick friends, cohorts, and campers and oddly in this one instance of nasty ex-bodily fluids, I feel that it is so much more demoralizing to deal with your own than anyone else’s. You clean up mine, I’ll handle yours. No one should ever have to clean up their own vomit, especially if they are still sick.

By the way, the soup (and everything else that isn’t red bush tea) tastes awful. But I have Murphy tied up and gagged in my like-a-closet and so help me this soup will be properly digested. I am done with little virus demons.

Special shout outs to the neighbor who checked on me whenever possible, strongly encouraged the hospital (advice which I did not listen to mostly because I had no carriage to take me), gave me soup, etc. and to the friend who found me ginger ale as soon as he got off work and drove to the hinterlands to deliver it.