Don't get me wrong...I fought it off to the bitter end...dipping kids into vats of hand sanitizer like strawberries into melted chocolate. But you can only stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, in the trenches with your rapidly falling comrades, elbow-deep in bodily fluids, before you must face facts: Help is not coming. A strong resolve, sure will, and blind courage would not be enough. Forget the Alamo...even if Amy-says-"No," the stomach bug laughs and says, "Yes."
It came for me Wednesday night.
Naturally, I responded with full-fledged denial. Just a little heart-burn. But my body continued to bubble and brew like a witch's caldron. Time for some false hope and self-delusion. I can fight this. I curled and stretched, folded and furled to escape the inevitable. I was a loaded gun...my esophagus, a burning barrel...but I refused to release the trigger. Inevitably...painfully...I realized that I was no longer in charge of my own destiny.
I will spare you the details of the next several hours. Suffice to say...I do NOT look good.
5:45am had me dragging to the door to head for school. "I'll drive you," sighed my sleep-deprived husband, knowing that that would be the fastest way to get me back in bed (or in front of the toilet) but I was already out the door. 6am had me standing, stooped-over, at the school's firmly locked doors, angrily texting my administrator. Her calmly unreasonable response that the school doesn't open until 7 prompted me to immediately throw up in the parking lot and then look for another way to breech the castle walls.
I drove around to the back and caught one of our dedicated maintenance staff in the beam of my headlights. He froze. "Why are you here so early?" he asked, watching me stagger from my truck and then draft behind him as he returned to the building. "I'm sick," I gasped, the icy wind and my stomach stabbing me simultaneously. "Show a movie," he told me, shielding my pajama-clad costume from the rest of the morning crew. I quickly assembled my sub plans, stacking the work in order of completion, dropped off a "Happy National Data Privacy Day" card off at Felicia's room so she could collect signatures and crawled back out of the building by 6:30.
"It's only 24 hours...it's only 24 hours...it's only 24 hours," I lamaze-chanted for the next eternity as my dachshund realized that a perfect Chloe-sized space existed between my knees and the base of our toilet. I cried when Brad put a milk-shake straw in my 7-Up instead of the pre-requisite flex-straw that my mother used to use. And what are these? Ice cubes? Does he hate me?
The 24 hours were up. I'd made it. My abdomen ached. I'd thrown out my back. My throat was raw. But I'd made it. Several people encouraged me to take Friday off as a recovery day. It was a Superintendent's Day, after all. Bunch of softies. But it was the conclusion of National Data Privacy Week. We had plans.
I avoided ALL food and went at a slow and easy pace, anticipating our much-anticipated, End-of-January birthdays celebration scheduled after school at Geri's house. This is where things really went off the rails.
Long ago, our pediatrician, Dr. Ang, sporting sassy socks with toe-thong-ed sandals, long extolled the virtues of the BRAT diet, God bless her heart. Obviously, she did NOT mean butter beer, rye bread dip, angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries, and tequila but c'mon! We were celebrating all of the birthdays! I tapped out mid-way though the crème brulee. Naturally, this caught my friend Katriel's attention as I typically have the makings for competitive eating at the Olympic level. "You got real quiet real fast," she said on our way home, "How are you feeling?"
"It was supposed to be 24 hours...it was supposed to be 24 hours...24 hours," I lamaze-chanted later, fighting a dachshund out of my way so I could properly regret my life's decisions.
Saturday morning would normally find me at the school laying out a week's worth of detailed lesson plans. Instead, Saturday morning found me laying out in the middle of my bathroom floor. "Don't you have emergency sub plans?" Brad asked. Yeah. Filled with activities that have NOTHING to do with my current instruction. Parts-of-speech BINGO. A subtraction-based Math Mystery packet. Dictionary work. A reading comprehension passage on an elephant sanctuary. A state capital crossword. "That's for emergencies," I told him crossly, re-adjusting the towel cushioning my knees, inadvertently making more room for a wiggling wiener dog. "I'd like to know what you think constitutes an emergency," he said as I waved at him to, please, leave me alone. Before I resumed my bathroom activities, I heard him mutter something as he walked away. I think it was brat. But, considering what I was doing...maybe not.
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