Here's Who We're Like

It finally came to me who Old Dave and I are like here in sickbay. Remember Charlie's four grandparents in Willy Wonka? We're like them. It even SEEMS like there are four of us in the bed, we've been in it so long.Yup. Were just here in the bed. I'm normally up at 5:00 but right now it's 7:30 and I'm just surfacing. Then I know I'll be back in the bed by 3:00 with aches all over.David actually did a business dinner last night, but then when he came home at 9pm he shed clothes like a snake sheds skin and was on his back and passed out cold five minutes after climbing in beside me. Also, the poor thing seems to have eaten something at lunch that has made his upper lip go straight out like Daffy Duck's.As for me, I'm still coughing like the Little Engine That Could in the part where everyone was pretty sure it Couldn't. Between 7pm and 8pm last night I wept copious tears while watching my recorded version of last Sunday night's Downton Abby and so my nasal passages were doubly stuffed.I thought about reader Paxi's advice about the Jamison with lemon and honey.I thought about hitting myself with the green velvet hammer that is NyQuil.In the end I decided to just 'go commando' as teen males seem to call it when they go without underwear. I decided to do without any meds in other words. 60 mile-an-hour winds tore and screeched around the house all night and here I am now in a new day, as here we all are.It's kind of pretty out right now with the branches all wet with raindrops, and  they say we might even have a bit 'o sun by noontime. I guess I'm just happy to be alive, to sum up - and to be honest, staying in bed is actually kind of fun when the company's good. :-) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29_uSlEEPSk]

Karma

I'm sick now too. First it was a tickle in my throat and then a rumble in my chest, like the sound from the engine room on the Queen Mary. This id what I get for making light of my man's illness.I went to bed the other night feeling as bleak as bleak can be, sleeping next to my dead Pope of a husband who had not uttered more than 12 words to me in 24 hours. (That extended whine is here.) But then, the next morning I woke to glory all around me: this sunlight in this room at January’s end. (David's reclining body in the foreground.)If only I had not, over the last few nights, curled up in the same small nest of bedding as a person who lay spouting like a whale – every cough and sneeze flying straight up into the air and settling in a fine mist all around me.By evening I had the headache too, and in spite of the 16 kinds of cold medications I took, it was excruciating. In the night I was sure that some evil force had got hold of the plastic-bag-like membrane in which the brain is suspended and was trying to pull the whole thing out through my ear.This is what I get for making Weekend at Bernie’s style jokes about poor David. It's my ‘goin’ around comin’ on around for sure.I had a flu shot back in October so whatever this is it’s presumably not the flu. David, however, did NOT have a flu shot and so presumably does have the flu.Anyway he’s still pretty miserable. I fetch him tea and toast, but he doesn't care about eating. Last night we tried to grab a meal out with our girl Annie but he couldn't even bring himself to have a drink. (what, no alcohol?!) He’s still got that thousand-yard stare, though and now it’s morning again too.And now we're home again our workday world with the Poop-Doggy-Dog-Walkers filing past outside our windows, sigh.I wish we had the view above that we had Sunday morning when we were up north. It sure did raise our spirits, sick or no. But the world these last few days is wrapped in fog and rain - and we're just here exchanging droplets. :-(

Sickbay

You tend to find it sort of funny when OTHER people get sick, perversely enough. When my man got sick the other day I felt so entertained by the sight of his coat just thrown on the newel post when I got back from the store, his dress shirt thrown on the bureau, a puddle of socks beside the bed. "He never leaves his clothes like this! What a rascal!" I thought.But then there he was in the bed, still wearing his pants, and his belt, still clinking with pocket-change though under the covers. He had that Walking Dead look like the zombies in the gory AMC series. (Well, he lacked the missing lower jaw and the bloody drool - but he sure had that 1000-yard stare.)I took his temp: 102.3. "You have to take something!" I cried and ran to the bathroom and ransacked the cabinets. Nothing in there of a helpful nature, not a single thing but eye shadow and mustache bleach. Then I ran to the other bathroom where six months ago I found a bottle of Children's Tylenol. that had expired in 1989. 1989! I did finally manage to locate a lone packet of Theraflu."But this is no good," I said, reading the fine print. "It expired in 2003!”"Close enough!" he said and I thought that was wonderfully funny. He drank the mixture down - and slept all that night and the whole next morning – right up until the time we had planned to drive north to find out if our place by the lake had turned into a solid cube of ice with this last cold snap.We shouldn’t go,” I said.“It’ll be fine,” he said."Ok but I’m driving," I said and I did drive the hour and 45 minutes while he lay in the front seat like the dead guy in Weekend At Bernie's.Once there he got right in the bed again, this time still wearing his coat. (Couldn't blame him; the house was freezing.) I took his temp. 102.1. I thought we had other meds here that maybe didn’t go back to 1989 and so we did. I got some of them into him. As I approached the bed he held one hand out."Death of a Pope," was all I could think. He looked like Pope John XXII always looked, one hand out, blessing everything in sight the way he did - only of course David looks nothing like that short fat saint of a man. (Except he's half Italian so actually there IS a slight resemblance. See? )It was so sad being up there at that joyful family place there with him sick. He spoke not a word for 48 hours. This is widowhood I thought, and felt so bleak watching stupid Friday night TV and trying to keep my spirits up . It was a frank relief when ten o'clock came and I could sneak into bed beside him.I killed the last light and darkness leaped into the room and encircled us. Strangely, I felt better then, there in the woods, in winter, the cloaking night all around us, the two of us and the deer and the trundling possum."Let go,” i told myself and for once in my life I did, and was instantly asleep and dreaming.