Fickle Fate

I've learned a valuable lesson in the last few days and it is well-worn and often-repeated advice that I plan to heed with more care from now on: Do not tempt Fate. She is a fickle, vindictive little troublemaker and it's wise to stay on her good side.

Late Thursday afternoon, I twittered something frivolous about lost chap stick and that someone should call 911. Jessica (from the hilarious BERNTHIS.COM) and I joked for a while about cute firemen. I pointed out that sadly, my only experience with cute emergency personnel, outside of parades, involved some kind of severe gastrointestinal issue (appendicitis) or childbirth. Takes some of the fun out of it.

Mere hours later, I puked in the bathroom with no fewer than eight or nine firemen and EMTs in my living room. (It's all right now, baby, it's a-all right now - five points! - and we are all fine, no need to panic here if you haven't heard the story.)

I blame Fate, that bitch, because I like Jessica and it can't possibly be my fault, I didn't feel well.

Let's back up. Gee wouldn't eat dinner and spiked a high fever right before bed, because, of course he did, because we all felt absolutely fine all day and we went to both morning and afternoon coop and generally came into contact with as many people as possible. He woke me up crying around 1:00 a.m. and I didn't feel well, at all, so I headed for his room expecting a delightful mommy/son vomit session. I couldn't even make it in to check on him. I felt dizzy and nasty and generally like I needed to spend some quiet time with a toilet and a cold tile floor, so I detoured in that direction and called out to Matt.

Gee was fine. He had to pee. Sigh. Matt, apparently, had the same nastiness that I had because as I rinsed my mouth there was a horrific crash from the downstairs bathroom. It was the horrible sound of my 6'3'' husband passing out without so much as sitting down or putting out his hands. Pretty much like a tree. A tree that hits its head on the corner wall outside the bathroom and bleeds heavily.

He was conscious, but not very responsive. He is also extremely heavy. I called 911 and they came. Did they ever come. I am very, very grateful and they were all wonderful, but if you saw the lights and trucks and sheer numbers of large, helpful people in our living room, you would have thought that a large plane crashed into the back of our house.

We had probably the most bizarrely hilarious conversation of our twenty-year relationship in the five minutes that it took for them to arrive, you know, if conversations can be hilarious when there's a lot of blood involved. Matt had crawled to the toilet and was sitting on it, holding his head.

Matt: What are you doing.
Me: I'm cleaning up all this blood.
Matt: Blood from what?
Me: Your head.
Matt: My head?
Me: Yes, your head, where you're holding that towel? You're bleeding?
Matt: Why?
Me: Why what?
Matt: Why are you cleaning it up?
Me: It's bothering Gee.
Gee: Did you get a red owie, Daddy?
Me: He's okay, buddy. It's a cut on Daddy's head. Matt, the paramedics are coming, do you want to...
Matt: Why? Who called them?
Me: I did.
Matt: Why?
Me: Your head. You're bleeding?
Matt: Call them back and tell them not to come.
Me: It's too late. I can see the lights.
Matt: WELL, I WANT TO SIT ON THE COUCH!
Me: Okay? Please crawl.

He did, while Gee and I watched all the lights approach and park and seemingly endless big, uniformed men head up our sidewalk.

Matt: Tell them to go away!!
Me: No. You have no idea what you are even saying.
Matt: Tell them to go away!!
Me: If you don't stop yelling at me, they are going to think this is domestic violence.
Matt: As if they would believe that I lost.

Thankfully, they took over immediately because all further conversations with Matt and his shaken brain were similarly annoying and repetitive and Gee was frightened and obsessed with getting ice for Daddy's red owie.

My adrenaline rush faded about three minutes later and I crawled back into the bathroom with my small son and his ice pack and vomited repeatedly. That would be how I ended up puking with large numbers firemen in the living room who weren't even there for me. They kept checking on me from a safe distance and I kept apologizing for forcing them to enter our hot zone of stomach plague.

They did end up taking Matt in the ambulance to the ER for eight stitches and a brain scan, but by 3:30 a.m., when he called me to tell me that he was waiting for a cab to bring him home, he had a firm grasp on the situation and could remember his birthday, etc. I felt vaguely guilty sending him off to the ER alone while lying on our bed, holding Gee's sleeping hand and wallowing in my misery. It's tough when you have kids. I do have friends who would have come over in a heartbeat to stay with them, but honestly, it was selfishness. The thought of puking repeatedly in the waiting room of the ER was overwhelming.

Friday dawned and we were all relatively fine, plus a few stitches. My three energetic little balls of healthiness bounced off of walls and watched a lot of TV and I felt like death. I muddled through the day trying not to get bitter. I didn't begrudge Matt a day in bed with a pounding headache and a stomach bug. But it seemed outlandish that, after puking eight times overnight and pulling some weird muscle heaving around my over-sized uterus, I should LOSE on the question of who was capable of dealing with the children.

The small dramas of life, played out in our living room. Two days later, I am hopelessly behind on everything, email, thought, life, my god the laundry. Now that we all feel well, I have a strong compulsion to burn everything we touched, like in plague times, because anything, witchcraft, exorcism, moving house, pretty much anything not to have that virus ever, ever again.