So, last Thursday I was moaning on Twitter about needing a day or two off from my completely suckadocious life, because I’ve been a reno-widow since before the holidays and the kids are totally tired of me, and I am completely fed up with them too, and I miss my life of eating dinner during hours that begin with the number eight or nine, my house is a dust-bowl where the children cough at night, which is also the only kind of gasping to be heard during the wee hours because there ain’t anything waywurd going on in here either. For ages now. And I’m all crabby and stabby and foul as shit.
One of my tweeps @thesearedays answered with this:
@GrumbleGirl Okay honey, gimme a question for the Eight Ball. We’ll cheer you right up.
I retorted charmingly with:
@thesearedays okay: will I ever get a day off from this cocksucking, motherfucking job? (Do you think that was too rude? *snickers*)
She replied:
@GrumbleGirl Signs point to Fuck Yes You Will, You Deserve Better (Eight Ball answer may be slightly exaggerated for comic effect).
See? Life was to be perfect in the near future. The magic Eight Ball said it was to be so. What the fuck happened exactly? This is where the baby Jesus and I part as friends. Again.
I made Martin and I a particularly gorgeous caesar salad for dinner that night, with roasted chicken in it, pancetta bits, pan-toasted croutons, and dressing that I made from scratch (with mayo, by the way, not egg yolk… I’ve got issues with eggs that I’ll get into another time, and raw egg is especially ick, so) when we sat down to eat at 10:30 PM, I was already starving.
Salad is light on an already near-empty stomach, but you can’t have a steak at 10:30 PM. Well, not if you plan on sleeping too. So as we discussed how he would basically be MIA for the entire weekend again (our second last before the new tenants arrive – we have to make EVERY hour effective now) we munched on our romaine lettuce happily, and I made plans to have a mess of bacon and eggs for breakfast the next day. I’d need to get fortified for a full weekend of having the kids all to myself. Again. Some more. Lordhavemercy. It’s almost over…
We retired just before 1 AM. This has been usual lately.
Only I didn’t sleep. And my stomach wouldn’t settle.
At all.
And somewhere around 3 AM I finally got up and made myself sick (which I only had to think about, really… I was ready) and went back to bed, hoping sleep would find me quickly, and that I’d be right by morning.
But it didn’t. And I wasn’t. Not by a long shot.
When Martin got up for work at 6 AM, I had to tell him I was in bad shape. He said he’d get the kids to school and stuff and not to worry about anything. To go back to bed. I wish I could have stayed there, but I had my head in a bucket for the rest of the morning instead.
He took the afternoon off and picked the baby up from preschool. I heaved all day long.
And all night.
I whimpered and writhed in discomfort. That tres urgent feeling of oh my god I’m gonna be sick right now never, ever left me. I couldn’t lie still. I couldn’t seem to remember how to sleep either, which only came intermittently, wherein I could escape my malaise. I was hot, and then cold. I had tremors. It was awful.
I would close my eyes and recall the High Fidelity soundtrack in my head over and over again (which is an excellent album by the way – I highly recommend it) and tried to cheer myself with the boppier tunes like Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy by the Kinks, and consoled myself with the mellower tunes like Dry the Rain by The Beta Band. It helped more than you might think. Plus, I love John Cusack. Thinking of him at any given time makes me pretty happy. So.
I had imaginary conversations inside my head with tweeps I haven’t met yet, like @smacksy… we talked about the merits of extra-high eyebrows (both sexy AND serious!) and about stealing cars. I had more in-my-head talks with FB peeps I-love-but-have-yet-to-meet-in-person like my soul-sistah Arlene… her gravelly voice and quit-fucking-around attitude made me want to get up. Inside my head, she made me giggle. And yet, the bile kept on coming.
From egg-yellow to dark-yellow to greenish-yuck to devil-brown…
I sipped water and Gatorade and flat gingerale and ate next to nothing. And laid in bed and moaned and trembled. Or wandered weakly to the bathroom barfing into a wastepaper basket. (The echo of the retching sounds are particularly ominous when one’s head is deep, deep inside one. Great acoustics. Scary. And gross.)
And Martin took care of everything. I heard snippets of conversation here and there… I heard a very tired and frustrated daddy try in vain to shush the children so sick mummy could sleep… He took them to the park. And then to lunch. And then to Home Depot (his home away from home.) And as he’d settle baby for a nap, and prop up our six-year-old with totally righteous video games for an hour or so, he’d run downstairs and finish trying to get the kitchen cabinets fitted into place because the counters absolutely MUST get on by Sunday, and OH FUCK is that a crack in this run of countertop? Can I call someone – my sister, maybe – to get a replacement for me from Ikea today? Because the sinkhole needs to be cut, so the plumbing can be done on Monday, because the tiler is coming to do the back-splash on Wednesday, and TABERNAC DE CHALLIS we need more quarter round moulding installed TONIGHT because the painter comes in the afternoon, and the handyman we hired isn’t in tomorrow…
He swears in French A LOT when he’s tired and cranky. He’s spoken more French in the past four months than I’ve heard him speak in years.
All this extra work on top of his 12-hour a day office job AND looking after the children AND the house, dog, groceries, cleaning, cooking bullshit AND doing office work from home AND trying to research how to install kitchen cabinets… well it’s too much for one man. It’s too much for Superman. He’s ready to crack, yo. Or cry. Or die. Or something.
And yet, he’d come and see me, with the most worried eyes you’ve ever seen, red-rimmed and kinda scared looking, and I’d try so hard not to whimper in front of him… we talked about whether or not a trip to the ER would be helpful… we decided it likely wouldn’t be. A full moon was looming (everyone knows that emergency rooms often become overrun with freak accidents, crazies, and pregnant women during the nights of full moons, right?) and we were looking to avoid sitting in that kind of scene in the middle of the night for six hours, only to be told, “You have a gastro – go home.” Anyway, I had to be better in the morning. I just had to. C’mon now.
I was feeling a bit better – or at least, I thought I was. The children were abed for Sunday night, and Martin promised to retire before midnight, though he was taking Monday off work. Likely Tuesday too. He hadn’t advanced by much at all over the weekend, of course, and life at the office was to be super-crazy-mental by mid-week, so the push had to be now. I heard him go to bed on the couch around midnight.
And then I got up to be sick again. And I was shaking like a leaf. And my body hurt everywhere. Was this from dehydration? Was I exploding? Or was that imploding? Enough. Hospital time. I had to wake poor Martin who’d been sleeping like the dead for exactly thirty minutes to say, Okay, let’s go. Let’s call a neighbour and get out of here…
Let me say a few things to the people in charge at hospital emergency rooms:
1. I get that this isn’t YOUR emergency, but sometimes the difference between your “calm” face and your nonchalant “I-don’t-give-a-fuck” face is more slight than you might realise. And this isn’t helpful at all.
2. Nothing makes a person want to vomit more than a visit to your toilet facilities, which by the way, could probably stand to be cleaned more often than once in what appeared to be a three or four day period. The overwhelming stench of urine alone would gag a soldier, and the remnant bits of bloody toilet paper from noses or other orifices left on the floor, strewn amongst crunchy bits of I-don’t-know-what and sticky spots of what-the-fuck are not terribly confidence-inspiring. Consider yourself on notice.
3. Thank you for finally giving me a bed to recline on, as I was writhing in your waiting room, but after being on it for an hour, was it so necessary, Nurse Ratched, to give my husband the heavy-eyeballed Oh, What NOW?! look when he used the call button? It was the FIRST and ONLY time we used it, you see, and he called because I appeared to be having a near-seizure or something. There’s no reason to get all snippy at 3 AM. That shit just ain’t helpful. It’s not nice, and it ain’t right. Bitch.
4. When you ask a person whether or not there’s a possibility that she might be pregnant, and she laughs in your face, it’s a far cry better than the response of SHUT YOUR WHORE MOUTH!! that she was about to say reflexively. It’s just that while suffering through this affliction, she was also having her period the entire time (and if that isn’t just a giant kick in the taco from the baby Jesus then I don’t know what is…) So don’t be hatin’. PS – Thanks for all the IV fluids and for instant pain-relieving meds. Glorious stuff. And thanks for munching on those breath mints ahead of time too.
5. Some of your nurses have really big hair and Easter-eggy colourful makeup and smell like candy. This is not necessarily a bad thing – it’s just an observation. Felt a bit like Nashville. I’m just sayin’.
We returned home around 6 AM, woke our saintly rockstar neighbour up off the couch, and sent him home. I made coffee for Martin, who got the kids up and got them ready for school. Monday. Yeah. I think he slept about 45 minutes in the hospital chair. My man is made of iron. My poor, poor darling.
I finally got out of bed for good on Tuesday. This is not, however, the few days off I was looking for.
You see, you really DO have to be careful what you wish for. I am thankful that this whole sordid affair wasn’t worse than it was. I’m guessing I picked up this bug from a shopping cart or a door knob someplace. It was only mummy down, and not the children too. And it ran it’s course – it’s not terminal. Anyway, I’m all better now. Still fighting off the weakness, and some lethargy, but I’ll get enough sleep when I’m dead. Which may be soon… but not today. It takes a fuck of a lot more to kill the devil inside of me. Heh.
We have an apartment to deliver by the weekend, and there’s no rest for the wicked.
But, when we get a chance to rest and have a date of some kind, it will involve some massage stuff at the Spa St-James (we have gift certificates from Martin’s crazy-generous boss from Christmas still to use) and yummy nibbling at some place gritty-swanky like Joe Beef, whose lobster pasta has my name ALL OVER IT, and a fantastic bottle of wine we’ve been saving (thanks again, lovely boss-lady!) and also something bubbly to drink alongside some oysters on the half-shell. And some time away from the children. And a lot of sleep.
And some condoms.
G.G.
NOTE: Thanks very much, my friends and my loves for any help you provided, and for your well-wishes and your healing vibes… you’re all tremendous. For reals.
