My buddy Chris Clark from work (at my old mortgage job, not my stay-at-home job... I'm not just keeping some dude around the house for my entertainment) used to ask me if Mike and I lived on an old indian burial ground for our extreme bad luck with illness, injury and other random household items. Well Chris... I think I'm just gonna answer yes now.
The illness and injury and "strange shit" rate in the Plavin household has now reached comedic proportions kids. It's ridiculous. I mean COME ON already. Current status:
Mike - back injured and sore, some kind of cold/flu crap he got from William
Me - walking on crutches thanks to a fall on my hip this morning, gotta call doc tomorrow about swollen lymph nodes all over, but cleared of the breast cancer scare after a mammogram and ultra sound
William - on week 2 of the cough he has lingering after the horrid bug he brought home last week
Elizabeth - feverish and at the height of the cough/snotfest that William brought home last week
Yukon (yep, including the dogs here) - liver is repairing, but mobility and bladder/bowel control is not great.
Ellie - Still need to take her to the vet because she is a literal dialy "snot cannon" who sneezes out a horrible concoction of dog food and green goo a few times a day.
I think it's time to invest in better vitamins, some horrid tasting made-only-from-vegetables daily drink, some good pyramid-scheme supplements and snake-oils, a Shaman, a priest and a good exorcist around here. Seriously, I'm out of options.
When I took William to the doc at the start of his bug (thinking he might have strep) the Pediatrician said she hasn't seen the rate of illness around here (not just us, I mean, but here where we live) in many, many years. William's school sent out a special email about keeping kids home and ALL my friends and neighbors (regardless of diets, vitamins, anything-you-can-think-of-to-boost-your-immune-system methods) are stuck in the same hellish merry-go-round of illness. I'm thinking we need to just send the kids in hazmat suits for a couple months and "Silkwood shower" the whole damn school.
As for Mike the illness would be enough... but no, we're Plavins and we do everything BIG. I believe it was last week or the week before that I hear Mike yell out in pain after a few minutes of playing with the kids. Here's the deal, Mike has Spina Bifida Occulta. His last two vertebrae are not formed as they should be. He has to be very careful with impact. William, however, forgets this and decided to try out is WWF moves on Mike and jumped butt first onto Mike's lower back. All 56 pounds of him. Mike's legs tingled for a few days and now he's very sore. "Can you smell what The Rock is coooookin!" - yes, yes I can Mr. The Rock and it's called a crippled Daddy.
Dizzy finally had a good night of sleep last night after two nights of crying, nightmares and breathing difficulty. But of course, following the Murphy's law of child illness vs. parent illness, she has the energy of 3 Jack Russells hopped up on crack, so getting her to get enough rest is going to take some sort of animal tranquilizer... or duct tape.
We brought Yukon back from the brink of liver failure and pancreatitis with the help of some meds from the doc, HOWEVER, the meds do not treat his spinal stenosis, so now he cries when he lays down now and his bladder/bowel control rivals that of a newly potty-training 2 year old. Needless to say, a trip to the vet and perhaps a 12-step program to get him off the booze might be the answer. "Hi, I'm Yukon and I'm an alcoholic"... I can see it now.
When we first brought Ellie home we actually took her to the vet fearing she had kennel cough or some horrible respiratory ailment because we have never, EVER seen a dog like that. She is a mucus factory. She has these HUGE sneezes, multiple times a day and look out if you're close. You will require a change of clothing. I'm NOT kidding. So I've been wanting to take her back to see if there are some allergy solutions or something, because I'm running out of "oh shit" towels in the house just cleaning up her snot. But between doctors visits for me and the kids and school-baseball-indoor playground obligations, there's been a delay. But our "snot cannon" is making us CRAZY, so I'm going to try to squeeze it in this week... if I can walk.
Because that brings us to me. As if the arthritis and William shouting "YOU NEED THAT" at a wrinkle-cream remover commercial doesn't make me feel enough like an aging freak, these past two weeks have involved a CBC, Mammogram, ultrasound, two doctors trips, the same flu/cold crap William has, swollen lymph nodes that I STILL need to see the doc about, and now... The Fall. The whole house is currently under quarantine to try to stop the spread of the crap, so I've been sleeping in our office. I was TRYING to get up with the kids today to let Mike sleep in again to help rid him of whatever bug he has. Dizzy is in there with me and I'm dozing again when I hear "beep... beep... beep..." OH SHIT. That's the burglar alarm. William (whom I vaguely heard come downstairs and thought was just going potty) had tripped the alarm attempting to let Yukon out to pee. So I scramble off the futon bed and start to RUN for the alarm. Only... I turn the corner really fast into our hallway and our beautiful entry carpet (there ostensibly to prevent slips on our hardwood floor) is apparently slippery to the barefooted human. Or at least to someone as clumsy as I am. My legs shoot out behind me, my arms in front of me and, assuming the pose of a runner sliding into home, I CRASH hip-first onto the floor. I'm in so much pain I can barely think and being an expert fainter, I start to recognize the fluttery, cold sweat, darkness-closing-in feeling as I at least crawl far enough to hoist myself up and disarm the damn thing. Then I collapse. Elizabeth is screaming and shaking me in her best Simba-trying-to-wake-a-dead-Mufasa rendition, William is crying and Mike IS NOT sleeping in. I'm now on his crutches and some Advil and he has drug his sick ass and our two freaks out to accomplish the grocery shopping I was supposed to do today.
I think we're an episode of Modern Family. I really do.
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