Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Eli 3.1: The Vomitron

Poor Eli 3.1. He's always been an unusually healthy and hardy kid. Yesterday he went down for his nap and we heard him start crying about half an hour later. Crying mixed with whimpering and borderline screaming, which he never does when he wakes up, so we know something's wrong. We both go bounding up the stairs and open the door to his room--and he is absolutely covered in vomit. It's everywhere--on him, on the bed, on the floor. It's like something out of a B-grade horror movie.

Gloria starts cleaning him up and I start stripping the bed, which must have a quart of puke on it. Pepperidge Farm goldfish, in case you're wondering, and the smell is so pungent and searing that I'm quite confident I'll never eat them again. In fact, that smell has convinced me that I'd rather not eat anything ever again.

After I finish hosing down his clothes and the bedding in the backyard, then laying stuff out to dry, I go back upstairs and start working on the carpet. Eli comes back in some fresh clothes and decides that he'd like to finish his nap, so he goes downstairs to a non-puke area. And fifteen minutes later he pukes again. And half an hour later he pukes again. In short, the entire house was basically puked on over a three or four hour period.

It's hard to explain how much anxiety your child's illness can make you feel. He was so sick that I was almost paralyzed. It's like you have so much fear inside you that you can hardly breathe.

We almost wind up going to the emergency room at 2:30 this morning--didn't have to, but it was close. This morning, the doctor runs a few tests and tells Gloria that Eli 3.1 has--strep throat. Bizarrely, when little kids get strep throat, they sometimes get these tremendous bouts of vomiting as one of the initial symptoms. I've never heard of anything remotely like this, but his strep test was definitely positive.

He feels much better today, thank goodness, and he's going to be fine. I'm running on very little sleep and expecting to catch strep myself, since I basically was dipping myself in a vat of Streptococcus all day yesterday. Plus I've had one piece of toast in the last twenty-four hours, because the initial blast of odor after opening his door yesterday has hard-wired itself into my brain. It's the most effective diet program ever. Blech.

I'll have Tiger Woods 2005 impressions later, plus a few other things if I get time to post them.

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