The one where we all fall ill

I now realize why they include “in sickness and in health” in wedding vows. Maybe they should also have you sign something similar in the hospital after you deliver a baby. I really don’t want to complain or make this post come out sounding whiny and negative, but I do want to update and inform!  For four weeks now I’ve been in a battle with mucus. It started out as painful chest pressure which developed into a nasty cough.  I was sleeping in the guest room so that I could just cough freely and get up as needed without disturbing anyone.  My nights were extremely long and restless. Each week things evolved in some form as I took my rounds of antibiotic, which I am convinced were sugar pills.  At this point, it’s mostly in my sinuses, the cough is down to just the necessity and I’m healing from the rib injury that this all caused last week.

I know it sounds crazy to you and me, but both my PCP and my OB weren’t surprised when I told them about the snapping/popping I felt in my ribs.  The diagnosis is fuzzy, fractured rib- broken cartilage- a joint that connects the ribs, in any case it’s excruciating pain.  Last Thursday when it happened, I felt helpless. I couldn’t move any part of my body without swearing from the pain. I felt like I’d been pulled into a very dark place and I couldn’t get an emotional release because even when I tried to cry about it – the pain in my ribs ended that, too.

Now I’m suffering from all of the over compensating I’ve been doing for my right side.  I try to do everything with my left (open doors, steer the car, grab things off a shelf or out of a drawer) and I have to lean and hold my side in order to cough.  This causes a lot of tweaking throughout the rest of my body.  Ah, the human body! What an amazing thing it is that everything works together and not one single part is isolated.  It’s just too easy to acquire an injury somewhere else while trying to heal from the original one!

This all started just before Thanksgiving.  I know we’re not the only ones either- I can scroll through my facebook newsfeed at any given moment and someone is complaining about being sick.  The crap is going around.  We even canceled our trip to Indiana because Mike’s family was passing around a stomach bug and on top of that Reed woke up with an unexplained fever on Wednesday morning that didn’t go away until halfway through Saturday!  Poor Reedster! He’s a trooper though.  I have to applaud his resilience.  He was whiny and needy each time the fever spiked above 103, but the rest of the time he was very smiley and happy as he ran around with a 100-101 degree temperature.

We even took our family pictures during his fever days! 

This past Sunday Mike finally fell from his throne.  Through all of this, he hadn’t waivered at all.  Healthy as an ox, or something.  He spent a couple of days down with the stomach bug and it was hard for Reed and me to see him that way.  Mike is our rock! We get sick and he takes care of us, and that’s the way it works!  So, it was hard to see him suffering from chills, snuggled under blankets, eyelids drooping and all I could do was stand there and feel helpless.