My daughter has a remarkable grasp of phonetic spelling. This week has indeed been totally phykd.
Gastro. Again. You’re going to start reading this and then you’ll look back at the date, sure you’ve read this post before. Didn’t they all just have gastro? Didn’t we all just make jokes about how the blog should be called Life With Gastro? How can they have it again? What is WRONG with these people?
Well I’m phykd if I know. After yet another months of chest infections, sinus infections and ear infections, we’ve hopped back on the spew train.
So far it’s just been Garnet, who woke up chucking in the middle of the night on Tuesday. He continued until Thursday morning, which is a bit over the maximum of 48 hours the websites on the Internet of Know Nothing say is how long the vomiting should last with a tummy bug. On Wednesday the doctor deemed him not quite dehydrated enough to go to hospital for a drip, as long as we could keep some fluid in him. So for three days this week I have had a floppy limpet lying on my chest, as I syringed mouthfuls of rehydration solution into his mouth, 5 ml by 5 ml, every ten minutes. Poor little possum.
In three days the only time he left the house was once to go to the doctor and once to wander in a desultory fashion around the backyard for a few minutes, actually kicking a bucket. Slightly dramatic, I thought. While he kicked the bucket I put yet another load of laundry on the line. My proudest moment came a second later when I grabbed that bucket and held it up for him to vomit into, just before he completely cut out the middle man and threw up directly into the basket of clean, dry laundry I had just taken off the line.
On the bright side, this week it was not the washing machine’s turn to have a breakdown, but the dishwasher’s. That was fine because it turns out that when Garnet isn’t eating the washing up is reduced by about 85 per cent. I don’t understand why, but he seems to use eighteen utensils and bowls every meal. We farmed May Blossom out to my parents for a few days, to keep her out of Garnet’s blast zone as much as possible, so we were able to give the old dishwasher some time to think about its behaviour. It seemed that all I needed to do was canvas Facebook for replacement dishwasher recommendations and make loud comments about getting a proper German dishwasher next time, to wash the dishes properly, like a German, and the miserable old Dishlex pressed its sorry carcass back into service. It’s now working as well as ever, which is to say not that well. It’s more of a dishwetter, but it’s definitely better than nothing.
So far no-one else has come down with this bug, but in a peculiar display of what happens when optimism meets pessimism, for three days I’ve been eating cookies like a person who is pretty sure they are going to get gastro in the next few hours. The result of that has been that I still feel fine except where my pants are too tight.
And that’s the news from the depths of the First World: vomit, broken appliances, a lot of laundry and a very bored me.
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