Wake-Up Call

I’m very glad to say that we’re all feeling better now. The flu hit our household hard – Jason was the only one that didn’t get it. Rebecca took the brunt of this illness, having a temperature over 39.6 degrees Celsius (between 103 – 104 degrees for our American friends) for four days. After a week and a half she’s starting to build up her stamina, and her trademark appetite is almost back to normal.
Seeing how brutal this virus was on our otherwise healthy daughter, I was really afraid of how it would affect Ryan. For a few days before the H1N1 vaccine was available to high-risk individuals, I was on the phone trying to find a way for him to safely get the vaccine. I was hoping that someone in town would be able to do a skin test with the vaccine to see if Ryan would have a reaction. Unfortunately, only allergists are able to do skin tests. As much as I love living in a small town, our access to specialists is really lacking. When we lived in Peterborough, we had a fantastic allergist that wanted to see Ryan three to four times per year. After moving to Owen Sound, we were referred to an allergist in Kitchener-Waterloo (which is two hours away from us), who only wanted to see Ryan when he needed to have allergy testing.
Here’s the deal – Ryan hasn’t been tested in three years. There is a good chance that his food allergies may have changed and I don’t even know for sure if he still is allergic to eggs. I hope that he’s not, but no one in their right mind would give him that vaccine without doing the appropriate tests. This was a real wake-up call for me – we really need to get this boy tested again. H1N1 will not be the last pandemic…there will be others. If we want to do as much as possible to protect him, we need to know what allergies we are dealing with.
Luckily for us, we have a fantastic nurse practitioner. She happened to call us on the afternoon that Rebecca’s temperature spiked and we were in her office two hours later. While it was too late for Rebecca to take an antiviral medication, our nurse gave me a prescription of Tamiflu for Ryan just in case he got the flu as well. This was the back-up plan I was hoping for. Sure enough, two days later Ryan’s temperature hit 39.6 degrees Celsius. We filled the Tamiflu prescription, and Ryan’s temperature was back to normal a few hours after the first dose. His only symptom of the flu was a loose cough…incredible. We may have won this battle, but now I’m preparing for an even greater one – convincing Ryan to get tested again.

I Think We've Got 'It'

Well…I think we’ve got ‘it’. I have been obsessing about ‘it’ a lot lately. Perhaps ‘it’ was circling the area looking for someone to infect, when ‘it’ saw little old me. I was telling my friend about ‘it’ (again) and she got that glazed-over look in her eye and gave the dismissive “mmm” as she turned back to read her magazine. I think ‘it’ might have felt sorry for me and wanted to put me out of my misery. But instead of focusing on me, ‘it’ chose to infect my first born. Cruel…I know. 'It' chose me next, then Ryan, and then Sarah. I don’t know if 'it' is H1N1 or some other rogue virus, but I’d just like to get ‘it’ over with.

At least we’re all sick at the same time. I don’t have to pack any lunches this week and I don’t have to rush anyone out the door with threats. We can even sleep a little bit later in the morning. (Which is helpful because Ryan had 3 nosebleeds last night and I spent the remainder of the night with Sarah sprawled across my chest.)

While we were sitting around the house, doing nothing but being sick, I learned a few things today. The first being that daytime TV really is as terrible as everyone says. We watched about ten minutes of the Wiggles on Treehouse - a show I haven’t seen in a few years. I didn’t realize that the yellow Wiggle is a totally different guy now. It used to be a goofy guy named Greg, and now it’s a broadway-ish guy named Sam. Hmm…just goes to show that if a Wiggle can get the boot, there really is no such thing as job security.

Here’s the second thing I learned today- I have poor judgement when I’m sick. I’m ashamed to say that I let a six year old watch “A Christmas Story”. I started to regret this choice after Ryan watched that poor kid stick his tongue to the frozen flag pole. (I made Ryan promise he would never do the same – or convince anyone else to do it, either.) I felt more regret after Ralphie dropped the phony f-bomb. Ryan looked at me with wide-eyes and asked, “Was that the f-word?” Thankfully, Ryan doesn’t really know what the f-word is. And …I felt total regret when Ryan laughed uncontrollably at Ralphie beating up Scut Farkus. Maybe Ryan is watching too much hockey.

Even if we do have ‘it’, we seem to be getting a little better each day. By Monday, Ryan and Becca will be able to go back to school and we might be getting a decent amount of sleep at night. Even though Ryan couldn’t have the vaccine, and the rest of us couldn’t get the vaccine in time, I think we’re going to be just fine.