I work at a small print shop. It’s just the owner, a part-time intern who calls in sick a lot, and me. We have a really big job due by tomorrow evening. Ideally, we’d have a week to work on production alone. Instead, the client was adding material and making changes until Wednesday morning, leaving us only three days to have everything done. And he wants 25% more copies of it than originally agreed upon. That means that my boss will be staying in the shop 24 hours a day and working all night, and taking a sick day is absolutely not an option, or else we won’t finish the project. Which is unfortunate, because my boss is getting over a cold, I’ve got a nice head-and-chest cold going, and the intern’s sick as well. Finally, on top of The Big Job, we have lots of smaller jobs that we have to try and stay on top of, and the phone’s been ringing off the hook. In short, it’s been a very stressful week.
Did I say finally? I misspoke. Finally was this morning, when I woke up around 2 a.m. with a strong and insistent urge to puke my guts out. My darling SO (hereafter “Hon”) followed about an hour later, then I went back for round two, etc. Somehow, his eggplant parmasean and linguini with tomato sauce had turned into a violent maniac within our stomachs. We spent the rest of the night getting what sleep we could in-between turning our stomachs inside out. I couldn’t even keep down water, which was a problem, because my cold was making me pretty thirsty.
When the alarm went off, we took stock. Hon had it worse, presumably because he’d eaten more. He felt weak and a little light-headed. Definitely staying home from work. I was much more functional, and as I’ve mentioned, a sick day was not an option. So off to work I went. Have I mentioned that we don’t own a car? So getting to work means spending 40 minutes on two city buses. Somehow, I managed not to throw up on the way to work, and I even picked up a bottle of 7-Up when I changed buses, because it’s what my mom used to give me when I had upset stomachs as a kid. I still couldn’t keep it down, though. Nothing was staying down for more than 20 minutes until I considered that the stomach acid building up because I wasn’t eating anything might be exascerbating the situation, and took several antacids. Bingo! Water and 7-Up stay down, stomach cramps mostly go away.
Now I’m worried about Hon. His cellphone is dead and the charger’s at work, and the landline phone is broken and we haven’t bought a new one yet because we never use it and we keep forgetting. And he hasn’t e-mailed me, even though I asked him to before I left the house and I’ve e-mailed him twice asking him to let me know if he’s okay. I should’ve left my cell phone with him so I could call from my work phone. Still, if I were him, I wouldn’t want to be sitting at a computer, and it’s unlikely that I’ll arrive home to find him passed out on the floor… right?
And he just e-mailed, thank Og. Says he’s fine, but been out of it all day, trying the antacids but still having trouble keeping liquids down. Anybody got any suggestions?
