Illness, not as Metaphor

...because, quite frankly, I'm just not that deep...

In the last post I wrote something about having some profound thoughts about illness, but if there is one thing I've learned from this 13-day bout of viral hell, it's that being sick is a lot like going on a big boozy bender. You only THINK you're having profound thoughts. In your fevered, delusional state, you're pretty convinced you're bloody Voltaire, Hobbes and freaking Wittgenstein all rolled up into one hot-thinking little sausage. But oh no, trust me my friend, you're not profound. You lie there in a miserable hot fever, a baby screaming in your ear and a fruit fly infestation buzzing in circles around your bed and you think, Oh I get it! I'm -- we're -- in HELL! Hell is life here on earth!! It all makes sense now!! You think you are a genius. But you are not a genius. You're just sick and pathetic.

Two Saturdays ago, June 23rd, while lying comatose in the blackest of sleeps, I was suddenly yanked into semi-consciousness by the presence of a soggy-assed baby sitting on my stomach, purring loudly.

"Ahraaaaaaaah," Baby Fangs meowed, poking her big curly head into my personal space and exploring my barely conscious face with her prodding, sharp-nailed fingers. Blearily I looked over at the clock. It was 6:30 am. I was so terribly tired.

"Oh God," I thought, "I'm going to die."

Just as I was thinking this, High Intensity bounded into the room. "Good morning mom!" she shouted and jumped onto the bed.

"Ooooooooooow," I thought desperately, "Talk about rubbing salt in the wound."

I was so tired I did not even feel human. My brain felt like a bottle of oozy glue. My lethargy went beyond the usual realm of sluggish inertia and into the surreal zone where misery, fatigue and vague thoughts of suicide meld into one terrible, terrible mood that always keeps Mr. IQ hopping to prevent me from killing someone. His efforts come mostly in the form of helpful advice to the kids, warnings like "Just Stay the Hell Away From Her!" and "Get Out of the Room, She's Going to Blow!" Actually, it's moods like these that remind me why we're still together. I could never be a single parent.

But unfortunately, when I woke up that Saturday morning, Mr. IQ wasn't there. He was working an overnight shift at this place where he gets paid to, well, sleep. He wasn't scheduled to return until after 11:00 am, either. There was only one thing to do, and that was to somehow get my butt downstairs to make coffee. It took about 15 minutes to muster my forces, and when I finally got downstairs I discovered to my absolute horror that the worst of all possible scenarios had happened: We were out of coffee. That this was a crisis of epic proportions cannot be overstated. Simply put, my day just doesn't start without coffee.

Hazily, I stumbled my way to the couch and collapsed on it, thinking, "How how HOW am I going to get through the next four hours until Mr. IQ comes home without coffee??" I lay there in a paralyzed stupour while High Intensity destroyed the living room and Baby Fangs crawled over my body and breakfasted on small chokeable lego pieces. (Note: Did you know "chokeable" is not a real word? Weird.) It went on like this forever, and I realized I had to do something. I needed to get it together and fast. Groaning, I asked High Intensity to read me the numbers from the stove. It was 8:13 am. Mr. IQ wasn't due back for three hours. I had no choice. I was going to have to make the trek to Seven Eleven.

Thinking back on our trip I am for some reason reminded of the scene in To Kill a Mockingbird when Scout and Jem are heading home from the Halloween party and there's a sentence like, "And so we set out together on the longest journey of our lives." Absolutely nothing happened on our walk to the local Seven Eleven, so I don't know why my mind conjures up that particular scene.

Except that it WAS the longest journey of my life.

What a sight we made. Baby Fangs, sitting in her filthy, pathetic squeaky wreck of a stroller, wore nothing but a diaper. Conversely, in perhaps an unconscious attempt to balance things out, High Intensity went commando. As for me, barely conscious, I managed to climb into the first items of clothing I happened to stumble upon, a pair of Mr. IQ's underwear that can sort of pass for shorts, and a somewhat soiled t-shirt emblazoned with the word "SLUG".

("Oh boy. I bet you were SEX," said Mr. IQ later that day when he came home and I was relating all this to him.

"Oh God, you have no idea," I said, cringing at the memory.)

So we set off. I have since taken note of the distance on my odometer, and I now know the Seven Eleven is exactly 1.1 km away from my house. How we made it there, I don't know. Each step was torture, and thoughts of the Bataan Death March kept flashing through my head. Well, perhaps that comparison is not quite apt. The Bataan Death March involved intense prisoner suffering at the hands of sadistic Japanese and Korean soldiers. There were beatings, outbreaks of dysentery and malaria, and a malicious withholding of food and water. I know the heat was unbearable and thousands died. It's a crude comparison, I know, but sometimes you just have to work with what history has to offer to make your point, okay? Don't lecture me! Obviously what I suffered on my trip to Seven Eleven for coffee was at least a thousand times worse than any wimpy Bataan Death March! Hello! I'm just trying to give you some generalized idea of what I went through, calm down already! I feel your outrage, really I do, but I've got a blog post to crank out here! Leave me alone!

Anyway, we made it there, and I got my coffee and we left. "We're going to sit here for a minute," I told High Intensity, pointing to the curb right outside the store. "Mommy needs to drink a bit of her coffee first." She eyed the broken glass suspiciously and then gingerly sat her panty-less buns down beside me. (I had bought her an apple juice, a pretty rare treat for her, and obviously the desire to drink it in comfort overrode any safety concerns she might have had regarding shards of glass in her ass. Heh.)

So we sat on the curb guzzling our beverages, a sad, sorry sight if there ever was one. And even after I'd finished my whole liter's worth of java I had to admit my fatigue was still there. Oh, the coffee had taken the edge off, that's for sure, but I certainly didn't have my usual euphoric "Hey Yowza, There's Coffee in my Bloodstream and All is Right in the World!" feeling. We plodded home. I went back to the couch. I waited for Mr. IQ's return like some await the Second Coming. My head hurt. I didn't know what was up.

Of course what was up was that I was in the beginning stages of one DOOZY of a flu bug. Mr. IQ came home and I slept all afternoon. Then he left again for his other job, just as I was entering the crazy fever stage. Baby Fangs spent the evening crawling over my 102 F body. "Oh God," I thought, "if only this baby would fall asleep, then I could possibly stand this." When she finally fell asleep I suddenly became aware that High Intensity was still awake and being particularly obnoxious. "Oh Gee," I thought, "Please, please, please make her fall asleep too. Then and only then can I be happy." When she finally passed out I gave a sigh of relief and sank down onto my bed. Only then did the full magnitude of my illness hit me, and I suddenly realized that I was really sick. "Hey, the kids are both asleep and I'm still miserable!" I thought. "The human condition is to be miserable!" The brilliance of my words overwhelmed me, and I suddenly realized that I was a genius. "Hey, I should write that down somewhere!" I thought. Then I too passed out.

And so it began. My horrible two weeks of hell. Mr. IQ was working what felt like 18 hours every day, so for the most part I was alone with the kids. It was awful. Everything has been a bit of a blur, but briefly, here are some highlights (lowlights?) of the last 14 days:

Day Two: More fever. The house is already a pit. Despite my fairly delusional state, I nevertheless take a vague, purely hands-off interest in what my children are up to, and realize something important. I've read that kids of non-functional adults end up being either super responsible, crazy workaholic types or else super irresponsible. I can see these roles being assumed right before my eyes by High Intensity and Baby Fangs after only 24 hours of benign neglect. Old H. I. is bustling around, telling Fangs what to do, bringing me glasses of water and preparing light snacks every fifteen minutes for herself and her sister. The baby just crawls around, filthy, not a care in the world. It makes me sad, and I cry a bit. This is a precursor to:

Day Three: The weepy stage. Everything, and I mean everything, makes me bawl. ("Ball whom?" my buddy Nitroglycol once asked me politely. Ha ha.) The dirt encrusted on Baby Fangs' neck makes me bawl. A bird on our lawn makes me bawl. A glimpse of my copy of Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz makes me bawl. It's all so weird and inexplicable! The fruit fly infestation makes me -- well, actually, it makes me want to kill someone. When Mr. IQ returns from work I am a mess. "I'll take the kids and get them out of your hair," he says, and they go have a picnic. While I appreciate the respite, the fact that he does not stick around to do at least some superficial tidying means that I am left to bake alone in a squalid hovel. I try to get up to clean but find I absolutely can't do it. This makes me bawl.

Day Four: High Intensity gets down the bucket of ice-cream from the freezer. I am too weak and apathetic to stop her. Pow-wow style, she and Baby Fangs sit around it on the floor, eating their way to the bottom. They have a blast. Baby Fangs is wearing a diaper that is swollen with urine to 17 times its regular size. She is surrounded by chaos. I watch them helplessly from the couch. "Hey," I whisper, my voice cracking a bit in self-pity, "aren't... aren't you going to bring me some?"

Day Five: High Intensity stops wearing clothes.

Day Six: I stop wearing clothes too, at least when no-one else is around. I insist on keeping my bra on at all times though. It is a maternity bra, and the flu bug has sapped the necessary energy needed to reattach the flaps that unhook for nursing. This means my naked breasts hang out of it like grotesquely huge hairless rodents gasping for air. This is not as sexy as it may sound, I can assure you.

Day Seven: High Intensity's Last Day of Nursery. I bring her to school not realizing that there is a big celebration planned, and the parents are expected to stay. The other parents and kids are all dressed to the nines. I am wearing Mr. IQ's SLUG shirt again. "I'm sick," I croak at the teacher. "Oh dear," she says, crinkling up her nose in disgust. I look terrible. All the parents stare at me, and give me a wide berth. We watch a video showing everything the kids have done over the school year. There is a nice shot of High Intensity picking her nose and eating it. I am embarrassed, and look over to where she is sitting. She is on the floor with her classmates picking her nose and eating it. She is filthy, and her hair needs a good wash. You are a failure of a parent, I think and then have a coughing fit that lasts for the remainder of the film.

Day Seven: Mr. IQ takes a picture of me at my most wretched. Once again, it pains me to show off like this, but I have to say that no-one, no-one on this planet can take an ugly picture like me; incredibly, however, this particular picture puts all other snapshots to shame and believe me, that's saying something. (I am almost tempted to post it here, but I'm just not that brave. Besides, then all of you would think I look like a monster. I'd have to post a really stunning picture of me alongside of it just to give some perspective. And that would just be dumb.)

Day Eight: Mr. IQ starts getting sick. Or did that happen on Day Nine? Day Ten? I'm not sure. All I know is that he's still sick. Last night, lying on the couch, he started muttering something under his breath. I looked over at him. The room was hot and dirty. Baby Fangs was sitting on his head in a less-than-crisp looking diaper. There were fruit flies buzzing around his mouth. He was naked from the waist up and sweaty.

"What was that you were saying?" I asked.

"I said I just figured something out," he croaked, "about Hell. It really is here on Earth! We're -- we're all in hell!! I'm in Hell!!"

"You betcha, genius!" I said fondly.

It looks like he's getting better. The profound stage means that the fever is breaking.