Lock your door, shut the lights off and hide under your bed. The stomach bug of '13 is here (again), and it's lurking around just waiting for a way to get into your home so it can wreak havoc on your family for like a week. This thing is like the Chuck Norris of stomach bugs. Apparently regular rules don't apply to this bug. The way I always understood it, once the stomach bug enters your home and leaves your family mere shells of their former selves, it can't come back again until the next calendar year. Kind of like a statute of limitations in reverse. Or something like that. I'm just talking ragtime here. I've only slept for a total of like 6 hours since last Tuesday since this epic bug has come in and picked us off one by one. The remainder of those hours have been spent either 1) cleaning up puke, 2) huddled over the porcelain god praying for a zombie apocalypse to occur in the hopes it would stop this bug somehow, 3) cleaning more puke, 4) buying cleaning products to clean puke, 5) playing Candy Crush while I wait for the next round of puke to clean up. I mean...why bother trying to sleep in the meantime? It's just a cruel joke being wretched from dreamland to race with a bucket to whichever child is puking only to realize I didn't make it in time and yet another change of sheets, blankets and pj's would be in order.
The fun started last Tuesday after I had cleaned the house top to bottom. I'm not joking. I had literally cleaned the bathrooms and used my handy new steam mop to sanitize all the floors. I then bathed the kids, cleaned their rooms, changed sheets, etc. It was one of those days I felt like I'd made some real progress and my house just smelled and felt clean. It was a proud 24 minutes. Shortly thereafter all hell broke loose. We put the kids to bed, only to find Ben screaming and covered in vomit 10 minutes later. My home quickly became a bio hazard area.
Men in HAZMAT suits quickly secured the parameter, evacuating neighbors from their homes and cordoning off the road with yellow tape so no traffic could pass. Brian & I got out the SBESK (Stomach Bug Emergency Supply Kit) and took our stations - one by each kid's bedside. I was feeling particularly confident about my odds of NOT catching this thing, since I had JUST had it in February. 8 weeks ago. I thought for sure that I'd paid my dues for the season and that I was off limits. Apparently I had grossly underestimated this new strain, and in a totally insulting turn of events - I got it again. Maybe even more insulting was the fact that we got it one at a time, and it's completely wasted and entire week away. One of the nicest spring weeks we've had yet. This thing is evil.
All that said, there are a few things you can do to protect yourself from this bug from hell...
1) Be prepared with your SBESK (Stomach Bug Emergency Supply Kit)....I know this seems obvious, but you'll want to stock it with some heavy duty cleaning products, old towels, and as many nips of Vodka as you can possibly fit into the kit.
2) Become a recluse. Stay away from all people. Don't leave your home. Quit your job, build a garden out back and live off the land so that you never have to make human contact with anyone who may be carrying the bug from hell.
3) Start a petition on Change.org to stop the stomach bug from being able to enter your home more than 1 time per calendar year. Let's stand together against this thing. There's safety in numbers. Oh wait, not it this case...it's actually a breeding ground for germs. My bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment