Did You See This One Coming?

Everyone raise your hand if you saw this one coming:  I got Conor’s stomach virus Thursday night.  OK!  I had no idea, so those of you with your hands raised know a lot more about this parenting thing than I do.  To be honest, I haven’t had the flu or a stomach virus since 1991.  In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever had the flu.  So I never anticipated that I would get sick.

It started about 1 a.m. Thursday night/Friday morning.  I woke up feeling full and queasy.  I was hoping it was just stress, but after 15 minutes I knew it was probably Conor’s bug.  From what Michael the RN told us Wednesday, when you get a stomach virus, there’s a part of your brain that gets turned on called “Barf Central.”  (Maybe not officially)  In any case, once Barf Central gets turned on, it sends messages along the lines of “Danger!  Danger, Will Robinson” to your stomach to get rid of all the food in it.  Apparently, Barf Central is run by an old television robot. 

Once the messages start, the stomach blindly obeys until it is sure that there is nothing left in it.  I felt hope, then, after two trips to the loo in 45 minutes because, pretty much, my stomach was empty.  However, Barf Central is a mean and evil part of the brain.  And it wants to make GOOD and SURE that there is nothing left in the belly.  And after I took a couple of sips of water and Pedialyte (YUCK!), it proceeded to smack me in the head by making me get rid of the ½ cup of water I drank and keeping me in the loo for another hour just to make sure I wasn’t hiding anything. 

I also realized somewhere during hours 3 and 4 of being tortured by the commandant of Barf Central that I would squeal like a pig if I was actually ever tortured for information.  I promised my brain that there was nothing left in my belly and when it didn’t believe me, I was ready to dig down and give it anything I could find in my body including my toenails to appease it.  Finally, around 4:30 am, Barf Central finally believed me and let me sleep for a few hours.

You may be wondering, at this point, what about our little guy who hasn’t slept through the night for two weeks?  How on earth did I deal with yakking and middle of the night feeding?  Well, Conor didn’t wake up.  For the first time in 2 weeks he slept from 8 pm until 7 am.  There were only two squeaks and both of those happened before Barf Central took over.  Oh joy and halleluiah!  I only wish Dave and I could have been asleep to enjoy it.

Yesterday was still pretty hellish.  Dave had off work because we were supposed to go to Kiawah this weekend for a half marathon.  As I could only get out of bed for a few minutes at a time, that trip was cancelled.  Dave is feeling a little puny, as we say in the south, but has not gotten the full on bug.  I do believe that one of the reasons I got sick is that I haven’t been exercising as much.  This is the least active I’ve been since I was 20 years old.  I usually work out hard 3 to 4 days a week, and those are my easy weeks.  I have got to figure out some way to get back into a regular workout schedule because I don’t want to get sick every time Conor picks up a bug from daycare. 

Off to figure out what to do with our “found” weekend.

10:05:11 AM