*Should come with a parental advisory when ill

I dissed February, and then it attacked March in retribution.

The scourge that has plagued my children for weeks finally struck me last weekend. I am just now coming back to some semblance of normalcy. I’ve missed out on a week of my life. I’ve lost a week of work, a week of sixty-degree temperatures, a week of blogging and blog-reading. I’ve even missed the deadline for a writing competition I had been stoking myself up for, in an effort to actually submit a short story for publication.

Damn you, February. You suck.

There are a few memories that float out of the ether and into my consciousness. There’s the fact that I was awake, grasped by a prolonged fit of coughing in the middle of the night, during the earthquake.

Oh, yeah. That’s right. February brought me an earthquake. Because it knows how much I enjoy the feeling of the earth moving beneath my freaking bed! What made it amusing however (and set off another bout of coughing) was that this time, J’s and my roles were reversed. The last time we had an earthquake in the middle of the night, I was the one asking him if we were having a damn earthquake. This time, he was all, “Wait. Why is that bookshelf rattling? What is that? Are we having an earthquake?”

Yes. Yes we were.

I also remember when J told me we were giving up on my ‘holistic’ measures—vitamins, and water and OJ and Zi-cam—and going “Shock and Awe” on my virus. If I remember correctly (and I can’t really say that I am, but what the hell) this involved Advil and Nyquil and Delsym cough syrup. I remember J trying to pep me up (really? A pep talk?), “We’re going after this fucker virus, Sarah! Are you with me?”

I think I gave my assent to his plan with a half-conscious groan.

On Wednesday, which was the dark day when J came down sicker than me, Super-Sophie gave up on trying to eat my used Kleenex, and in a true act of altruism, started carrying them over to the kitchen trash can. Not that she actually could throw them away (she’s a dog)—but she did drop them in the vicinity. That or she was just taking her ill-gained booty to the exact opposite corner of the house from where I was located.


The best part was when K put me in my place. In some fever-induced delusion, I thought I was going to get up, get around, and go to work. He then asked me to identify what day it was. When I proved that I had lost all concept of time, he turned to me, and said, “You’re shitting me, right?”

I didn’t even chastise him for cursing.

Now, however, I am slowly stepping back from the brink. I’m the kind of girl who likes to think that we are supposed to learn something from being knocked on our ass, but I’m not quite sure exactly what the lesson was just yet.

Unless the lesson is that there is a lot of cursing when I’m ill. In my head, falling out of my mouth, and even in my fever-delusional dreams.

At least I wasn’t mumbling about elephants. I hope.