Rough Week

How wonderful is the weekend! Hilary has this rare day off in the midst of her peds rotation, and I certainly can use the break myself. We certainly need the recuperation - it's been a rough week (hence the relative lack of blogging).

It started, not surprisingly, in pediatrics. Hilary (and, we later learned, one of the residents) came down on Sunday morning with an awful GI virus. You probably will recognize the symptoms - exhaustion, fever with chills, joint aches, a generally unsettled GI tract and, of course, gut wrenching, tie-you-in-knots vomiting. It laid Hilary flat out for all of Sunday and Monday, which she wisely called in sick for. All contemplation of food was banished - even saltines seemed out of the question. She was feeling well enough on Tuesday to return to work, but took every opportunity to sit down, and had another bout of vomiting once she returned home.

Things were looking up as she returned Wednesday for an overnight, just in time for me to come down with the same ailment. I guess that was inevitable. I struggled through a long meeting that morning, trying to hide occasional shivers, and then somehow survived until an early afternoon meeting before throwing in the towel. During the hours in between, I tried to remain focused enough to be productive - compose a few emails, write debrief notes from the morning's meeting, prepare for the afternoon's - but it just wasn't happening. My joints ached enough such that sitting was uncomfortable. As I passed the secretary's office on my way out to announce my departure, she commented on how pale I looked. That was my cure to walk back to the bathroom for the second time that day to, well, you can guess. I finally came home and crashed for a few hours in bed, only to wake up and crash for a few more hours on the couch. I fared a bit better than Hilary, however, and was feeling well enough to return to work the following afternoon.

Although Hilary and I have been functional since our respective recoveries, we would hardly consider ourselves fully healed: we're still tired a lot, food's appeal comes and goes, and we're still trying to catch up on fluids.

So, it is very well indeed that we have this day to try and get our acts back together. It's a good day for sticking around the house, too: temperatures started off below zero, with approximately zero chance of sunshine.

Back to the gatorade.