The Plague - 2007

There has been a nasty bug going around our neck of the woods, I not-so-lovingly call the "Stomach Gomboo."

Of course, this plague has to be something whose love is shared amongst the entire family. Luckily it hit our home full-bore all within a week's time. I think I'm finally showing symptoms as the last one in my family to have the illness.

The worst of it happened on Thursday morning early. I had gone to a Jordan High Alumni Association meeting the night before and had some programming I needed to get done on their site that night.

While finishing things up in my office, I started to smell a quaint, pungent odor that very much resembled the scent of a dead animal. My office is in the basement and has a window so I figured we must have some dead animal near my window and I'd just need to check on it later.

I wrapped things up around 3:00am and headed up to bed... neck and shoulder muscles tensed up over the last few days from a lot of stress from the last couple weeks. I stopped in the kitchen to take a muscle relaxant before lying down to sleep.

While in the kitchen, my nose started tracking the dead animal smell again... I couldn't figure out for the life of me where it was coming from, so I smelled around the most obvious places (the garbage can, the disposal, our neighbor's small gold-fish tank we had on our kitchen counter while they were away from home... but none of them were the culprit.

Giving up, I retired to my room. Not five minutes after laying down, I had the feeling I needed to get back up and go check all the doors to make sure they were locked; as I had forgotten to do so before I went to bed.

As I reluctantly got out of bed; I heard Mandi make a weird coughing sound from her room. I decided to peek in on her before checking the doors. I never made it to the doors.

As I entered the room, the dead animal aroma hit my nose like a fly on the windshield of a car doing 90mph on the freeway. It was more powerful than ever. Just as I was reaching Mandi... I hear her start gagging. I reach for her and felt wet all over the place.

After yelling for Gwen to get in there and turn on the light... I aided Mandi to sit up and realized that she had not only been sleeping in puke, but had also messed herself from the other end. I don't know how long she'd been that way, but it had to have been at least a half-hour or more.

Trying to hold down my own gag reflex, I got Mandi off her bed and rushed her into the bathroom where we spent the rest of the early morning cleaning her and her bedroom up and trying to keep her fluid intake matching her body's outflow (still coming from both directions.)

I finally made it to bed at 5:30am whilst my poor wondeful wife remained to finish the HazMat Disaster Crew duties.

Needless to say, I had to take half-the-day off work because by the time 5:30am had hit... the adrenaline had worn off and my muscle relaxant had taken over. Gwen could barely wake me up enough to call into work and I'm sure I sounded like a stoned druggie to my boss.

I finally woke up at 12:30pm, disoriented and not feeling like doing much of anything (neck and shoulder muscles still tense...)

The next morning, Kimmie and Brennan joined in the puke parade, but luckily had much milder incidents.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the exorcism of this plague from our humble dwelling. For now, we love you all, but please stay away.