I got the flu over this past Thanksgiving. Not one of those I-have-a-head-cold-and-I’m-calling-it-the-flu kind of things, but a real flu with fever, chills, extreme exhaustion, etc. I was so exhausted that if a pallet of 100 dollar bills had fallen in my yard I would have called my fiance and told him to come home and pick up the money rather than walking 12 feet into the yard. Because of this horrid flu I developed an ear infection and had to get on a plane to fly to Texas the next day. I got some antibiotics from the doctor and she said I wasn’t contagious so I got on the plane and spent the first half hour and the last half our of the trip in tears because the pressure on my ears felt like my head was going to blow up. I then slept 14 hours a night at my parents house that week trying to recover from the illness and the travel at the same time. I’m just glad we were there long enough for the antibiotics to cure my ear infection or the flight home would have been hell too.
Two in particular come to mind.
First, I must have been about seven that Christmas. . .I have four sisters, one of whom is only two years older than me. We both had the flu. . .on Christmas. I remember us laying on opposite ends of the sectional sofa, each with our own bucket. Yay. Merry fucking Christmas.
About twenty years ago, my hubby and I were newly married; we were planning a long weekend getaway without our baby (who was about two). At the time, we lived just outside of Baltimore, MD. Elkins, WV, where we had decided to get away to (it really is a beautiful place!) was about five hours away. We had an inn booked, we had child care lined up, we had everything in place; less than two days before we were scheduled to leave, I got gallstones and had to have emergency surgery! We did eventually get to Elkins (leading us to live in WV now), but damn. My timing sucked.
Norine, perhaps you never would have come to appreciate Elkins in quite the same way had it not been for your misfortune. I choose to look at that incident as an overall positive. 
When I was six or seven, I came down with chicken pox on the family vacation to Hawaii. We spotted the first pock while we were on the plane.
After a few days (? it was a long time ago) of being in quarantine, I was allowed out of doors, but no one wanted to play with the pocky girl. 
My family went to Kilauea to look around, but after awhile, I got tired and whiny and itchy and my parents gave in and took us back to the hotel. When we got back, we turned on the TV, and the volcano was erupting. We had missed it by half an hour.
Then my baby sister caught the chicken pox from me. Cue: screaming infant.
Then my mom broke her foot.
Then there was a tropical storm.
And my family never went back to Hawaii again.
Similarly, my wife came down with an incredible gall stone bout on a millennial cruise. She (we) were airlifted from the Virgin Islands back to Fort Lauderdale and she had her gall bladder removed at 10:30 PM on December 31, 1999. Apparently… [wait for it] … her gall bladder wasn’t Y2K compliant. The good news was that the travel agent had accidentally signed us up for travel insurance and we got almost all of the cruise money back and my hotel room covered and a rental car and our airline tickets. It was awesome!
I’ve had pneumonia on my birthday. Twice.
The most excruciating, though, was coming down with food poisoning on a city bus a week or two after arriving in the Soviet Union. It was so bad I got off the bus and lay down on the sidewalk because it was cool there. Two clasmates had to drag me back to the dorm in a taxi, where I completely lost control of my intestinal tract. Not fun. Luckily, the worst was over within a few hours.
You could be right. Growing up without mountains around me, maybe I never would have come to appreciate them quite so much had I not had to postpone that trip. . .
Heh. This reminds me of our family vacation to Colonial Williamsburg, in Virginia. My then-youngest daughter was maybe six. No older than seven (I know because she was eight when I had her baby sister, and I wasn’t even pregnant at the time. . .). Days before the trip, I spotted one lone pock on her forehead. I thought that was what it was, but asked her “Honey, has anyone in your class had chickenpox recently?” and she said not since the winter. So we went on with our plans.
You may have already guessed, on our drive to VA (about a three hour trip by car), she came down with a full-blown case of chickenpox. And we were set to meet up with friends there, too! That poor kid got such a bad case of chickenpox, they were all over her body, including very sensitive places. It got to a point where she would not pee (because it burned too bad) until I finally decided to try diaper rash ointment. Worked a charm.
Still fucked up the vacation royally, though, and I’m sure it’s not one of her fondest memories of childhood, either!
Good lord, I think we need to cancel Thanksgiving altogether!
I got chicken pox on my… fifteenth? birthday (something like that). Same day as the party and we had to call everybody and say don’t come!
Then I gave it to my sister who is two years older than me and was going to get the vaccine in about a week.
New Orleans on Lundi Gras (day before Mardi Gras). I was out with my fiancé and her cousins walking around the Quarter. I began to feel a little queasy. The heavy drinking hadn’t started yet, so I knew it wasn’t alcohol related. I told them I was heading back to the hotel and I’d hook up with them later. By the time I got to the hotel, I realized this wasn’t a temporary thing. I spent the next couple of hours in the bathroom, not sure ahem what opening to put over the toilet. During this drama, I kept thinking about how we promised my fiancé’s cousins that they could spend that night with us. They extended their trip by one day because, well, we were getting married in the morning! My wife comes back later that evening and tells me that luckily they managed to find a room. A couple hours later, whatever I had starts hitting her. We were both fighting over the bathroom all night. To this day I have never been sicker, and we were getting married at 8:30am Mardi Gras morning.
After an absolutely horrid night, things thankfully subsided in time for us to crawl out and make our wedding in Jackson Square. In the wedding pictures, I look like Charles Manson on a bad day. I don’t know if it was flu or food poisoning (I think the latter), but it was hell. Every time I hear that Alanis Morrisette song I think “Rain on your Wedding Day? RAIN, that’s it! No vomiting, no jet propelled diarrhea???”
Missed a class trip up to Six Flags New England. Dad & Mom took me later on but wasn’t anywhere close to the same.
Then there was the time that I was sick on the day Dad was supposed to drive us to St. Louis for Christmas. We went anyway and, by the time we got there, I was feeling better.
While assisting in a bowel resection. Suddenly a nasty viral gastritis took hold.
It’s very bad manners to barf into a patient.
I didn’t, but it was close. Thanks to the mask, mainly.
You didn’t, like, unearth a cursed tiki statue by chance?*
*Brady Bunch reference
Just recently, I came down with strep throat. A month after our daughter was born. On a Friday, so I couldn’t go get a prescription until Monday. So I had to be quarantined all weekend, leaving my wife to deal with the baby by herself. The baby, which had just decided to fully commit to being incredibly colicky. Also, my parents were coming to visit us that week.
My wife forgave me, eventually.
There was also the time when, as a kid, I went to Disneyland with my family. One of the first things I did was have a hot dog, which I then promptly threw up. My dad took me back to the hotel, where I slept off one of the worst headaches I’ve ever had. Yay Disneyland!
You just reminded me how I missed my BFF’s Chuck E Cheese birthday party in first grade when I was sick. My parents wouldn’t let me go. I was crushed.
I was sick for trick-or-treat night at least twice when I was a kid.
On the way home from my first ever trip to Vegas, I started feeling a bit achy and queasy about an hour before the shuttle back to the airport. I got some Tums and Aleve, didn’t help. The vomiting hit about an hour into the redeye flight. My husband was obliviously sleeping through my misery. Nothing like puking in an airplane bathroom to brighten one’s evening. Puked twice in the plane, once in the bathroom during the layover, and spent the rest of the layover flight huddled under those thin airline blankets, shivering, but thankfully not having to puke, as this flight was much smaller. When I got home and took my temperature, it was over 102 degrees. Ended up in the ER getting fluids. Nothing like spending a weekend drinking in the desert and then getting the stomach flu to dehydrate a girl nearly to death. I think I got four IVs before they sent me home, and it took five attempts in two arms just to get one in. Luckily I knew I’d need an extra day off to recover from the trip under the best of circumstances, so I didn’t have to call in sick upon my return from Vegas. But when I got back from the office, I looked like I’d been spending the entire week shooting smack.
My husband missed our daughter’s first Christmas because he had something very similar to my Vegas illness. He got up and started puking at 5 AM, and puked and slept off and on until 6:30. PM.
Well, I got a stomach bug for all of Spring Break when I was a kid.
Two years in a row.
That is horrible, yet somehow appropriate.
All these vacation episodes remind me of a that I got a terrible case of poison ivy just as we were leaving on a family vacation. I barely remember it, since I was only about 4 years old, but it was bad enough that we had to stop somewhere in Pennsylvania (driving from West Virginia to Cape Cod) to find a doctor. I had it all over my face, including in my eyes. My sister was the one to get in trouble for that incident - the day before she had convinced me that it would feel really good to rub poison ivy leaves all over my face.
There was another vacation illness episode when I was about 14, traveling to Colorado with my parents. I got diarrhea so bad that we ended up spending an extra day in Salinas, Kansas, waiting for it to subside before getting back in the car. I remember my parents being furious with me, since they really hadn’t planned on spending a vacation day somewhere in the middle of Kansas.
How could I forget getting bronchial pneumonia on my honeymoon? My hands swelled up so much that the ring we were using as my “engagement ring” didn’t fit - and promptly got stolen by the cleaning staff.
Well, you would have won the thread. Would have.