Here’s my story:
I was visiting my parents, about half an hour from where I live. Sleeping arrangements are a little strange. Normally, my mom and I share a bedroom, my dad gets one of his own, and the foster daughter stays in her bedroom. My mom has this habit of going down and sleeping on the couch, because the mattress is hard as granite.
About 4:30 Sunday morning, I woke up to an “all hands on deck” alarm. Please imagine James Earl Jones leaning over and saying “Get to the bathroom. NOW.” in his most Darth Vader-esque voice. I got. Then I suffered through the hottest, nastiest, stinkiest diarrhea I’ve had in a looooong time. It was bad enough that when it was over, with only a few sinister gurglings remaining, I went downstairs and asked my mom for some Immodium. Didn’t want to go through that again.
Well, it worked. I didn’t. Instead, I started projectile vomiting. It was kind of like having my torso gripped and squeezed by the Hand of a Very Irritated God. My stomach was His stress ball. The first time was bad enough. The second time, my mom woke up downstairs to the noise I was making, came upstairs, offered me sympathy and a cold, wet washcloth (wonderful mother, I shall pay for the dancing boys in the nursing home). A little while after I got out, I brushed my teeth, looked in the mirror and stopped. I had petechial hemorrhages - tiny little pinpoint bruises on my face - from vomiting so hard. Scared the heck out of my mom. She thought I had rhumatic fever or something.
I was out for three days and ended up emailing my lesson plans to the HR lady from my parents’ computer. That would have been the end of it, except for my darling parents’ foster daughter, a former student of mine. You see, in my family, when someone’s as sick as that, they go into quarrantine. My dad went to the store and bought food just for me - chicken soup, ginger ale, and sherbert. The sherbert even had chocolate chips, which shows you how well my dad knows me. Well, knowing the foster daughter well enough, I explained to her that she really shouldn’t eat any of the sherbert because my germy hands had been in it.
Next morning, I came down to find she’d eaten half the sherbert. That night, my dad served spaghetti and meatballs. Can you see where this is going?
Yes, she got the same bug as me. Unfortunately, she doesn’t get sick very often, so she was unaware of the “where to puke” guidelines. She was sitting on the toilet at the time, her guts evacuating themselves with gusto, when the puking hit. And instead of turning her head towards the bathtub, she sprayed down the linoleum, the base of the toilet, and the tiny space between the toilet and the bathtub.
Now, my dad’s 76. No way, I’m letting him clean that up. He’d never get back up again. My mom was at work and at a new job, and she absolutely could not afford to catch this bug. So guess who got to clean up after the foster daughter? Yep, petite moi. Took me the better part of two hours, and I swear if that stuff had hit the heat register on the floor, I’d have sent my dad to the movies and burned the house down instead.
So, yeah, I know whereof you speak.
