Sick, Sick, Sick

It has been a full two weeks of sickness in this house. It all started two Thursdays ago when I awoke with a sore throat, awful headache, body aches, runny nose and a fever - the telltale signs of influenza (and just to get it all straight right from the start since there is a lot of misinformation out there: the flu almost never has anything to do with vomiting or diarrhea - those are gastrointestinal illnesses and the flu is a respiratory illness). Anyway, one-by-one, one day after the next, each of the three kids joined me and we coughed, sneezed and groaned/complained/fussed our way through the days. After several days of high fever, it would then come and go to the point that each morning I would take everybody's temperatures to see who had a fever that day. Just when we thought someone was improving, they would backtrack again. All three kids ended up getting ear infections and everyone developed a nasty, deep cough.

All three kids and ME got turns with the nebulizer this time. :(

After about week of feeling rotten myself, I started feeling better and then my cough worsened and I started coughing up tons of green mucus and started feel pretty awful again. I self-diagnosed it to be bronchitis which I'd had before and hoped it would get better over the weekend. I finally gave in and called my doctor Monday morning after being sick for 12 days, but she couldn't see me until the following day. When I took Jake into the pediatrician's for a follow-up for his ear infection later that morning, she ended up listening to my lungs after she heard my cough, said I had pneumonia and prescribed some medication. At that point, I felt pretty lame for trying to push my way through it all, as I know that pneumonia can become pretty dangerous left untreated. Thankfully, the medication worked almost immediately and I have only a little bit  mucus left in my lungs (that I can tell). In general, we are all feeling sooo much better as of the last couple days, but we are still on the tail-end of the sickness with lingering coughs, congestion and general fatigue (well, for me at least on that last symptom :).

It's been a crazy ride. We've missed church, Bible study and AWANA for two weeks and several special events (good-byes to our dear friends that left for Brazil, a birthday party, etc). The days were long being cooped up in the house, the nights were even longer with sick children that needed their sick mommy many times during the night. I couldn't have made it without my dear mother who was helping out on day one, contracted our sickness sometime around day four, and then was back to helping us again several days later when she felt well enough. She even spent the night twice in the very beginning when I had a 103-degree temperature and could barely get out of bed. We were also blessed with a couple meals from our church family and had many prayers and thoughts coming our way. I think the most difficult thing about it was how long it lasted. I don't ever remember being sick for so long! It was no 24-hour type of bug, that's for sure! Every night I would go to bed thinking, "Tomorrow is the day we will all feel better." And it didn't come. I want to say it has come now... finally! But even so, you can still hear the mucus when two of the kids are coughing and today we ventured out to Costco and I was downright exhausted when we returned. It's hard to take it easy like I know I should, when I am sooooo ready to back to our regular life and routine.

And where has Kevin been this whole time? Lucky for him, he started crab fishing the day before I got sick and has been out at sea. He would have been able to come home yesterday for the first time since he had to come in from sea for two nights because of some stormy weather, but, unfortunately for us and him, he couldn't risk getting our germs and getting himself and possible his whole crew sick with the two-week long bug! So he stayed on the boat and got some work done. Completely understandable, but nonetheless hard to deal with when we haven't seen him for just over two weeks! And extra stinky when we are soooo close to being all better. Ben just prayed tonight that Daddy wouldn't have to work every day on the boat so that he could come live with us. :( But such is how it goes for the fisherman's family.

He did send us a few pictures of his first catch that you might enjoy too. He was pretty excited to fill up his newly designed fish-hold that he worked on so hard on last spring. Thankfully, it worked out exactly as he envisioned and is making crab season go a lot smoother this year (figuratively and literally, as the design actually makes the boat ride more smoothly!). He didn't know exactly how much crab it would hold and was quite pleased to find that it can hold at least 31,800 pounds, which is what he is standing on in the picture below! There's about 15-16,000 crab under his feet!

Kevin with his first load of crab for the season.

In the next picture you can see how deep the fish hold goes after they unloaded a bunch of the crab and how it goes out in four directions from the the area Kevin had been standing on at the top! That's a lot of crab and we are thankful!

Looking down into the fishhold: the white around the edge of the picture is the top opening part where Kevin had been standing earlier.

 So, we hope and pray that the next time Kevin can come home that we are not sick with this illness or any new ones! :)