Life in the Sick House

What a month! Here I am, trying to write something pithy and relevant with three kids home sick, and the accompanying chorus of sniffles, phlegmy coughs and bickering over the tablet usage (carefully metered out by me).

It seems that at some point for the last five weeks, someone has been sick every day. When you stop to think about it, we've got 5 people in three different schools, so I suppose the odds of one of them bringing home a virus are pretty high. But this has created an awful cycle of infection, mutation and re-infection that has Tertius and Quarta missing their fourth day of school in a row, and has even laid out Secunda, who would rather eat lava than miss school. It's even affected Primus, who normally has Wolverine-like restorative powers*.

Through almost all of it, Hubby has been trucking along, working all but one day where he really hit the wall and took a day to rest. The tricky part of his job is, you kind of need to be a bit psychic: to know far enough in advance that you're feeling sick enough to miss a day so that you can write up TOC (Teacher On Call) notes for the person filling in for you, ensure the resources are prepped, and have it ready for them at the school office, or on your desk for the following day. What often ends up happening is that Hubby works on the day he feels the worst, spending extra time after school prepping for the TOC before he can come home and collapse into bed, exhausted. On top of that, taking more than one sick day at a time can negatively impact his lesson plans, putting the students behind where they should be. In a semestered school, this has even more impact. This does not exactly set him up to get better quickly; rather, it puts him into a position of going back to work before he actually feels better, and having a further compromised immune system to work with. The end result is that he is more susceptible to subsequent viruses, and functions at a low-grade sick level with periodic flare-ups for the rest of the winter.

The kids are snot factories, coughing without a care for where their little "sick particles" land. I feel like I'm constantly reminding them to cover their coughs and sneezes; the words, "Please don't cough into my face/tea/food" are uttered more than I'd like.

And me? I've been sick this whole time. Low-grade, not bad enough for cold meds for most of it, but in the last 5 weeks, I've had what bordered on an ear infection, swollen glands and lymph nodes, laryngitis, impacted sinuses, and most recently, blisters on the back of my throat. Unrelated, I've also been having bad flare-ups of the tendonitis in both wrists, what feels like arthritis pain in both hands, neck and shoulder strain, and a pinched sciatic nerve on one side.

I'm so ready for this to be over. I have big plans for de-cluttering our house, setting up new furniture pieces, reorganizing the master bedroom, and painting the bathroom.




* I swear, this kid gets a sniffle, sleeps for 18 hours straight, and he's fit as a fiddle!