Sick

Well, most of our summer is shot. We've been sick here for a very long time. It started with Emily something like a month ago. She just had a cough, an occasional low grade fever and a slight lack of appetite. Not much. The rest of us seemed to be fighting something but we were not sick. As soon as Emily started to show signs of recovery, Caitlyn started to exhibit the same symptoms. None of it ever seemed to stop the kids from running amuck and playing. It didn't seem like a big deal.

Then a couple of weeks ago, we packed up and headed out to San Diego to visit family and go swimming. Caitlyn up-chucked 15 minutes down the road and we turned around and came home. Late that afternoon, I started getting really sick. By evening, I was gone. I was bedridden for the next several days.

Christian had some important things he had to do at work for the next couple of weeks and could not afford to miss work. He started feeling ill and stayed home Sunday with me to get some rest. He even walked to work on Monday morning as usual, but by the afternoon, he was burning up with a fever and I loaded the kids up to go get him.

Now, Christian and I didn't simply have a little cough with a low grade fever. Our fevers were quite high. In fact, I had a temperature for 7 days. It was not unusual for it to be 102 or 103 degrees F. Christian was forced to take a couple of days off, but then he went back to work doing half days for the rest of the week and then back to full days the week after.

I had a complication with my recovery. Instead of starting an upswing after the fever finally broke, I ended up with a mild case of pneumonia. And after sleeping on and off all week, I was no longer able to lay down and sleep the second week because I couldn't breath. I had to prop myself up in weird ways to catch short amounts of sleep before having to wake up coughing or having to shift my position because an arm or leg was getting numb or because I had a vicious kink in my neck. It's been hell.

So this is me, 2 1/2 weeks later...finally starting to recover. I thought we just had a flu but I'm thinking now that it wasn't. When school let out in June, there were a lot of kids missing. I heard that there was an outbreak of pertussis (aka whooping cough). I made sure that even Emily took an afternoon nap so that she was healthy and strong for the first week after school ended. Plus, both girls have had all their immunization shots.

Christian spoke to a friend of ours who is a nurse in the area and she confirmed that there has been a definite rise in pertussis cases in the area. Now I think that that explains a lot about our sicknesses and why the kids had only mild symptoms. Christian and I were immunized for it but when we were kids like the girls so we got hit a lot harder by the disease.

So anyway, we've been a little crazy holed up at home for going on 3 weeks now. The kids have done amazingly well considering. They've had a couple of bad spells of fighting and not wanting to clean up their toys but they've been enjoying not having to do anything else but play, watch movies, play on the computer, and in the sprinklers all day.