Wife has been sickly for about three years. The past couple months she’s been bouncing between the hospital and a nursing home. Yesterday I got a call (imagine this in short, gasping phrases I could barely understand, SOP lately, and edited to fit), “They figured out why I’ve been sick the past couple weeks. I have norovirus.”
“Noro, n-o-r-o? What’s that?”
“It’s bad.”
“How bad?”
“Google it.”
“It seems you have what your Brit relatives call the ‘Winter Puking Bug.’ You’ll be fine in a couple days, but I shan’t be visiting you.”
I texted licensed-food-safety Oldest about it, who asked. “Which nurse gave it to her? None of us have it–we’d know.”
So, I get home and Wife calls, “I’m hungry. Bring some fresh mozzarella balls and tomatoes.”
“You’re sick and I’m not getting near you.”
“That was last week, when I couldn’t eat.”
“You told me to tell your cousin not to visit.”
“She came anyway.”
She hasn’t fucked with me like that for months, though I got suspicious when I looked up the disease. Glad to have HER back.
She’s medical and knows what she had is nothing everybody doesn’t have mutiple times, and is nothing to worry about, especially after it has passed. I didn’t and was worried, but found the description in Wikipedia, in the first sentence, “Norovirus, sometimes known as winter vomiting bug in the UK,” as a clue she was messing with me. As noted, time and conversations were compressed. I guess you need to spend 40 years married to someone smarter and better educated than you to know you need to keep your guard up. We’ve had some rough patches the past few years, and exchanges of “I hate you” were apparently not that serious. And thank you.
It makes perfect sense. It’s not remotely incoherent. I don’t understand why people seem to have so much trouble with things written in perfectly normal English.
Glad that your wife is doing better, and seeming more like her old self. I know how hard it can be with a loved one who is going through mental difficulties.
The only one of his posts that were written in normal English was post #9. If he had led off with that as his OP, the rest of us wouldn’t have had any trouble understanding him. The rest were incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness ramblings.
When I read the OP, I could tell that part of it was meant sarcastically, but I had no clue whether it was the part about loving his wife or the part about hating her. Which, you know, kind of completely changes the meaning of the post. A post which can equally well be interpreted in two exactly contradictory ways is a post that cannot be understood at all.
Not trying to be a dick, but was the “fucking with you” part that you didn’t know what Norovirus was, so you thought it was something rarer, and she knew you’d make that assumption? 'Round here its name is all too well-known (we’ve had a couple of super-bad outbreaks in my community), so I didn’t read that as a weird thing to say at all.
I love ya dropzone, but I gotta admit, it was a bit difficult to follow and figure out what exactly was going on. And since you’re from the area, Norovirus hits the local media usually a couple times a year. A suburban high school just had a big outbreak of a couple hundred kids getting it a few weeks ago. Colloquially, it goes under the name of “stomach flu,” here (although there is more than one virus that could cause viral gastroenteritis.)
It was also big in those cruise ship outbreaks where everyone got sick over the last few years. Also, suspected at the RNC convention, as discussed here on the Straight Dope. You were even part of the thread!
