I spent this weekend in the kind of hell that's only reserved for the worst sorts of monsters. Seriously. I actually kind of feel sorry for the people who put toilet paper rolls on backward and double dip potato chips at parties. When you finally get dragged down into Perdition, buddy, you are gonna be so screwed.
The whole episode actually got started back on Tuesday, when my son woke up with a terrible bout of gastroenteritis. (I'm going to spare you the gory details, dear reader, but suffice to say it was pretty bad.) Now since I have three children I am highly familiar with the way these things spread around, so I immediately went to DEFCON 1. This called for wiping down all surfaces with bleach wipes, followed by coating every living thing in a thick protective layer of hand sanitizer. And it would have worked too, h̶a̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶d̶d̶l̶i̶n̶g̶, I mean, had I not gone into my son's room on Thursday night to play XBox games with him for an hour or so. Of course I used his controller, the very thing he'd been smearing his germs all over the entire week, and this little bit of dumbassery was followed by completely forgetting to go through the proper decontamination procedures when we were done. You know, the ones I'd put in place MYSELF only two days before.
So yeah. Gastroenteritis.
Friday I did not get out of bed all day. I couldn't even move. It was bad enough that at one point the LOML decided it warranted an ER visit. Let's just say the details of that trip are a bit fuzzy for me; being unconscious tends to leave those pesky time gaps behind. When I finally got past triage and into a room, it took two liters of IV fluid, three doses of anti-nausea medication, and a CAT scan to determine that no, I wasn't, in fact, dying, but was simply suffering from a particularly nasty stomach bug. Luckily they sent us home with a couple of extra barf bags, because I threw up the entire way. Even after all those meds. One nice side effect, however, is that they knock you out like a tranquilizer dart, so I came home and slept all the rest of the night and most of Saturday. Today I'm up and about, but my stomach still isn't very happy. In fact I'd say it's highly suspicious of me and my motives at this point. I'm basically subsisting on bananas and saltine crackers.
Sorry if this is TMI,by the way, but you know, in the interest of full disclosure, the glamorous life of the writer, etc., I feel obligated to share.
Hell, isn't oversharing one of the defining characteristics of modern society anyway?
Of course now I'm down to the last week in March, and my pledge of #12for12stories remains unfulfilled for the month. I have an idea, though, and I tend to do my best work under intense deadlines and self-imposed guilt/pressure, so hopefully things will turn out ok. I'm heading into the coming week alive, and that's a reason to be optimistic, right?
In the meantime, there's always crackers.