There is nothing like a good bout with the flu to put you in your place. This week, influenza came full force through our house, knocking our door off its hinges and giving almost everyone in our house a good licking.
I got it the worst.
It started the first night with what appeared to be strep throat. I Googled the symptoms of my self-diagnosed illness and checked off all relevant bullet points. Sore throat? Check. Fever? Check. Headache? Check. It was nine o’clock on a Saturday night. The best thing I could do was go to bed.
I called it an early night and let my husband take over baby duties. When I woke in the middle of the night, I had passed strep throat and was convinced I was entering my final hours on earth. My entire body ached. My throat was still in pain, but it was the least of it.
“I’ll get the kids ready and we can drive you to the urgent care center,” my husband pleaded with me the next morning.
I hurt too bad to get out of bed, much less go to the urgent care center. The last thing I could stomach was sitting around a room full of people sick like me — all waiting to get called back by a nurse and receive their prescription for an antibiotic.
“Just let me lay here in misery,” I cried, doing my best to channel Barbara Hershey as she lay dying in the movie “Beaches.”
“Stop being so melodramatic,” said my husband.
I looked at him with my bottom lip out and my eyes drooping. “Will you get me some more Sprite?” I beg.
Sprite is the only thing I can stomach. Surely this flu will be good for at least a 5 pound weight loss, I think. If I can lose weight, than not all is lost.
The second day I didn’t get up once. When my husband comes to check on me I cry.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be well again,” I tell him.
“You’ll get better,” he says as he picks up the pillows I’ve thrown to the floor around our bed.
The second night is the worst for my husband. Our 2-month-old misses me and doesn’t go to sleep well without mommy holding him. He ends up crying into the wee hours of the morning keeping my husband up past 2 a.m. on a Sunday night. My husband decides to go in late the next day since he was up all night with the babe.
He ends up working from home the entire day as I am still incapacitated. I miss my 5:30 a.m. work-out sessions. I miss my column deadline. I miss numerous work tasks that I had put off until Monday to finish. I miss holding my baby.
I lay on my couch unable to sleep another hour, since that’s all I’ve done for the past two days. My daughter wants to lie next to me and I have to tell her to sit at the end of the couch. “Mommy’s sick, sweetie pie and I may make you sick.”
She pouts and goes back to playing Barbies.
I think about rethinking my decision not to go to the urgent care center. I might as well be Val Kilmer in “Tombstone” suffering through tuberculosis. I’ve been quarantined in my own home. When I finally get the energy to stand up, the first thing I do is laundry. I wash every bed sheet, quilt, and blanket I’ve taken solace under during this unforgiving ailment. I let them soak in hot water and send them through the wash cycle twice.
There’s a lesson in everything I tell myself as I take the blankets out of the washer and feed them to the dryer.
What’s my lesson?
I’ve dropped the ball repeatedly the past three days. The flu had hit me in the head and knocked me across the back of my knees. It was like a hitman for the mob, making sure nothing I was supposed to do got done. And that was the lesson I decided upon. Sometimes, not everything gets done and that’s OK.
Amy Gesenhues is a freelance writer who lives in Floyd County. You can read her daily commentaries at www.AmyWroteIt.Wordpress.comE-mail her directly at amy@amywroteit.com
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GESENHUES: A lesson from the flu
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