A Nauseous Super Naus

Well, this should technically be a full post, but there are two factors which mean that it will be at least slightly abbreviated.  One is that Christmas is falling just two days after this post.  Christmas is our big holiday this time of year, and often I wish you a happy-merry this and that, but you’ll just have to revist an older post for that sentiment this year.  (Check out my series listing of the informals and look for the “Happy Holidays” section.)

Because the second factor is what I alluded to last week: our family has been laid low by what we suspect is a norovirus: that is, a stomach flu that basically makes you barf your guts out for 24 – 48 hours or so, then magically just goes away.  In terms of evolutionary function, I’m still trying to work out what possible use this is to the actual virus.  I mean, obviously viruses can’t think and don’t have ulterior motives, but living things evolve a certain way for a reason, even if it’s a dumb reason.  In this case, though, I got nothing.

Our eldest child kicked us off, and the long lead time before anyone else started vomiting is a dead giveaway that they were patient zero.  They’re doing an intern program for an education class, you see, which involves sitting in for primary school classes for a certain number of hours a day.  And primary schools are just breeding grounds for bacteria and viruses: when single-celled pathogens get together, at pathogen conferences, or informal pathogen meetings, or even just hanging around in pathogen bars, they swap stories of their favorite primary school classrooms.  So patient zero here contracts a norovirus from some snotty-nosed kid, brings it home, and starts barfing.  It was only one really good day of digestive system evacuation, then it was over ... or so we thought.  It was almost a week later before the littlest one started barfing; the middle child kicked in about 2 or 3 days after that.  Then another week, and it was my turn.

My experience was, basically, you spend all day thinking you’re gonna barf, but you don’t.  After a while, you start to wonder if you’d feel better if you just went ahead and did it and got it over with—after all, that’s how it usually goes when you’re sick, right?  You feel nauseous, until eventually you vomit, then you feel better ... right?  Oh, no: not this time.  Because eventually you do barf, but you still feel nauseous.  Then you spend a few more hours thinking you’re going to barf again, but you don’t, until you do, then it starts over.  This continues until eventually, the hours of feeling like you’re about to hurl just continue indefinitely without any actual hurling, and you wake up two days later and you’re mostly okay.

And also I have to say: this was some of the most violent, stomach-churning barfing I think I’ve ever experienced.  I literally felt like my stomach was being wrung out like a dishrag in order to eject all its contents.  I luckily only experienced this twice; our baby girl had at least 15 episodes like this, until she was just bringing up water.  We tried denying her the water so she wouldn’t have anything at all to vomit, but that just led to dry heaves, which, if you’ve ever experienced that, is even worse.  So we went back to letting her drink water.

Water is pretty much the only thing I could consume, by the way.  I got a good lunch in before it started, then didn’t eat again for over 24 hours, and even then, it was a single packet of applesauce.  Later that evening I graduated to KFC mashed potatoes (light on the gravy), but, even then, I felt like I was pushing it.

But today I’m mostly better, and all my other humans are mostly better.  But it’s been a harrowing couple of weeks: even one of the dogs and one of the cats got into the act with us—entirely coincidental, I’m sure, since I don’t believe noroviruses are cross-species compatible, but it just felt like the miscrosopic world was out to get us.  Now that that episode is behind us (hopefully: The Mother never actually succumbed to the virus, although she got close a couple of times, so it’s still technically possible we could have one more go down), we can move on to Christmas.

Christmas and barfing don’t seem to have much in common, but allow me to tell you one more little story before I let you go.

Last night the family and I went out to L.A. Zoo Lights.  I was still breathing very carefully and moving pretty slowly, but I figured most of the serious barfing was over, and, besides: we’d already paid for it.  And plus the smallies were looking forward to it.  So I sucked it up and we went.  And it was okay: super-crowded, of course, and, in the end, probably not an experience we’ll repeat any time soon, but nice to say we’ve done it once.  On the way back home, needing some distraction from my stomach in order to deal with the LA freeways, The Mother put on the audiobook version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas—specifically, the 1966 animated special version, so the “audiobook” is essentially just the entirety of the audio from the show.  This is excellent, of course, because you don’t actually need the visuals to appreciate Boris Karloff’s amazing rendition of the book, and you also get the songs (which were specifically added for the special).  “Welcome Christmas” (you know, “fah who foraze, dah who doraze”) is nice, and “Trim Up the Tree” is mostly forgettable, but what we’re really here for, of course, is “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” as sung by the amazing (and amazingly named) Thurl Ravenscroft.  As I was concentrating very hard on this audiobook while driving us home, I can tell you quite definitely that there were a surprising number of allusions to my condition in this song, starting of course with the “seasick crocodile” reference, which I thought was a pretty apt description of how I was feeling.  But the final verse really brings it home:

You nauseate me, Mr. Grinch,
With a nauseous super naus!
You’re a crooked dirty jockey and you drive a crooked hoss, Mr. Grinch—
You’re a three-decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich, with arsenic sauce!

A nauseous super naus pretty much perfectly describes my last two days.  Now here’s to hoping that my heart will grow three sizes and I can get back into the proper spirit of Christmas.  Because, you know, Christmas is in our grasp, as long as we have hands to clasp.