Two storms collide..........

November 7, 2011

No mountain trip. A storm system moved through Arizona the day before we were supposed to go, leaving ugly white shit covering the higher elevations. Someone said, “But it’ll be so nice and cozy inside and you’ll get to see snow.”
Like I don’t still have nightmares where I’m trapped in the middle of a Buffalo blizzard.
Plus I got sick.
Well, Liv came down with an intestinal bug first – on Thursday. I got it Friday, while she was getting better, leaving me with hope that Saturday would be the day I recovered. I was wrong about that. Let me just say, it’s Monday now and my stomach – and other parts of me - are still making noises I’ve never heard before in nature. Mom got it as well and Mark is fighting it off. Only Brandon, whose immune system is fortified by Lays potato chips and Vitamin Water, has thus far escaped unscathed. We’ve laid the blame for this virus that took us down like dominoes at the feet of the shortest member of the family and, no I don’t mean Kimmy – who, by the way, was ill as well.
Kache. The little two-year-old carrier is the only common denominator. His daddy brought him over on Wednesday for me to watch and wanted to know if I thought Kache had a fever. His torso was warm, but the rest of him was fine and, though his eyes were a little droopy and glassy, he ran around like a wild man as per usual, so I really thought nothing more of it.
Livi crumpled like a cheap suit the very next day. Same feverish symptoms, plus severe aches and pains and all the stomach fun you can think of.
I didn’t put two and two together till the next day, while in the middle of a bout of, “Oh my God, whhyyyyyyy me,” Kimmy called, whining about the exact same thing. She and I put our heads together and figured out it was the kid’s fault.
When we confronted Loran, Kache’s completely healthy mother, her response was to tell us to quit belly-aching (an incredibly poor choice of words if you ask me), then wonder who was going to watch the little disease monger if both his aunts and all his grandparents were out of commission.
Now that we’re all either well or well on our way, nobody’s plotting to dress our little punkin’ up like a girl or shave his mother’s head for revenge. Liv and I are satisfied that we’ve dropped visible weight – after all, one is never more than a good stomach flu away from fitting into something or other in one’s closet that’s been out of reach since the invention of the Klondike Bar. And anyway, who could possibly stay mad at a two and a half foot being with eyes so blue they’re almost purple and whose favorite new saying is, “I not a little baby. I a little angel?”
Mark did remind me throughout all of this that, “If we’d gotten our flu shots,” like he said we should, “we’d never have gotten sick.” I’m not completely sure that’s true, however. How do we know this was the flu? It could be just some virus. I remember a couple of years ago, when Liv got sick. I took her to the doc and she was convinced – even pre-blood test – that it was swine flu. We’d held Loran’s baby shower the day she came down with it, so I had to call every person who’d attended and let them know to go get shots. Only to have Livi’s blood work come back negative for Swine Flu. I really have doubts about the validity of the effectiveness of a flu shot or the medical community’s ability to tell us what is flu and what is some other microbe they can’t quite identify.
That was Friday morning.
Today?
Here’s what I’m thinking. The mountains are still there and will remain, at least through the middle of next August, when Mark will be needing, desperately, to get me out of the desert before I spontaneously combust. Till then I’ll be here, hanging out with Kache. Over at Walgreen’s. In line for my flu shot.