Last One Standing

It has been a long week in the Castle by the Beach…actually closer to ten days of unrelenting pestilence, disease, and infectiousness.

After enjoying the relaxation of a week’s tropical holiday (an actual week), where Happy Hour begun at two o’clock and the waiters knew our standard orders, we returned to reality with quite the thump.

Darling daughter headed off excited as a fluffy bunny to school camp the day following our return while husband developed some kind of respiratory affliction that I wrote off as an exaggerated case of man-flu. Now Dear Readers I am not particularly inclined to endure the torment of continued sighs, moans, and fits of coughing with anything resembling patience. Yes, yes, I know it’s hard to believe, on the outside I appear this calm, easy-going, compassionate type, but mere millimetres beneath the surface lurks a persona akin to Miss Trunchbull. Barely a whispered mention of an affliction by a long-suffering family member and I am threatening solitary confinement in The Chokey or throwing them out into the street by their piggy tails.

I blame my dear mother for this, and that dreaded Green Medicine. During my childhood, my Mum worked, a lot, in three different jobs, days, evenings and weekends. While I sincerely thank her for my strong work ethic, my tenacity, and my superior ability to scale the walls of domestic buildings to get in through the tiny toilet window when I had forgotten my door key, she certainly built me into the robust individual that I am today. If my brother or I claimed to feel off colour, have a sore tummy, a cough, or a headache, Mum would reply calmly and gently ‘Oh dear, I had better get the Green Medicine’.

This concoction of tortuous tastes was a veritable magic wellness potion. The slightest taste of it upon your lips would render you gagging with its revolting piquancy, and result in a rapid and somewhat miraculous recovery, despite none of it actually being consumed. Even now, I still have an aversion to green liquids such as Midori <<shudder>>.

I am that weirdo who wipes the handles of the shopping trolleys with a disinfectant wipe before using it (have you seen the hand cheese on those petrie dishes of festiness?) and the person who remains trapped in the public restrooms until someone pushes the exit door open so I can beat a hasty retreat without actually touching the door handle.

Oddly enough, my favourite subject at high school was biology...self preservation perhaps, know what you are dealing with.

So, I packed the husband off to see his GP, and he came home with the usual assortment of sprays, pills, and recommendations for bed rest (oh to have a spare room…). I banished him to the fold up couch in the playroom where he could enjoy a Netflix binge in peace lest he spread his festering droplets of disease onto the rest of the family.

After a fitful sleep that night due to the frequent bouts of coughing reverberating through the plasterboard, I received a telephone call from my daughter’s lovely teacher. It was five-thirty in the morning. My immediate thoughts were ‘Oh my goodness, she has fallen down a large crevasse in the middle of the night on her way to use the facilities.’ But no, her weary teacher advised that my girl had been up all night with a bucket for a companion and could I come and collect her as soon as possible. Thank you Universe for leaving her intact, but oh my goodness how sorry I was that she was so unwell on what should have been an exciting adventure, and that her poor teacher had been up looking after her all night. I was also most worried that she was potentially going to be the cause of a mass epidemic of the most grotesque proportions given she had been sharing a room with 24 classmates…was I destined to forever be a social pariah amongst the other school mums for my parental failings?

My thoughts were promptly interrupted by ‘You might want to bring a bucket.’

I collected my daughter (Chucky Buddies in hand, tarpaulin on the seats, antiseptic wipes poised) and drove back down the unending, and very winding, road home. Straight into the shower went my bedraggled offspring, and then into a bed covered in a haberdashery’s worth of towels.

I swiftly decontaminated her suitcase items (hottest wash, some Napisan, and tea tree oil for good measure - no bacteria was going to survive that bombardment) and then washed my own hands, several times, with soap – lots of soap, singing three rounds of Happy Birthday for good measure each time.

The tension was building.

Friday dawned and husband was on the decline. All of those years of ‘I think it might be something serious’ and this time it possibly was. As he gasped and wheezed I implored him to go back to the doctor as no one wants to visit one of those 7-day medical centres on the weekend (unless you are dying, I think possibly then it might be tolerable), you know the ‘Take a Number’ type where you are not sure whether you are ordering half a kilo of lunch meat or explaining your symptoms.

Darling daughter had thankfully stopped vomiting by then and I set off with her bundled up in the car to collect my son from school.

As I was about to leave for the journey home, my telephone rang. Barely audible, wheezing, and frail, husband tells me that he has been diagnosed with Influenza B and is ‘off to hospital, probably for a couple of hours’.

Now experience tells me that ‘for a couple of hours’ at a public hospital could be roughly translated as ‘pack for a week’ and put your ‘Out of Office’ on email, so I told him to at least pack clean underwear, and I would collect him from home to drop him there.

Fortunately, the hospital is now a mere five-minute drive from home. Husband was rapidly deposited somewhere near the front entrance (he wasn’t in a basket, and I didn’t leave a note), he was apparently whisked into the Isolation Ward and told to prepare for an overnight stay.

On the positive side, the hospital is brand new, he was in his own private room, and the Shepherd’s Pie was an improvement on the cheese on toast that I was planning to serve.

One husband down, one child on the mend, one child perfectly healt….but wait, Sunday night number one son starts to cough and complain of feeling unwell, really unwell – to the degree that not even the promise of chocolate can rally his spirits.

My first week back at work following my holiday (now that seems like a distant memory), was interspersed with doctor’s appointments, prescription collections and avoiding breathing in the presence of my loved ones. My son too was diagnosed with the flu, the real one, not just one of those marketing industry created green slimy creatures with the halo of germs, great now we will be known as ‘That Family’ the ones who infected the entire population of the Sunshine Coast with an assortment of viruses.

I have wiped every surface with disinfectant, opened every window and door (despite the Arctic winds), and washed every piece of clothing, bedding, and towels, drying them in the germ-busting sunshine.

Now I am preparing to undertake some sage smudging to rid my home of these seasonal demons, or maybe just plan my next holiday, by myself, somewhere tropical, with many, many Happy Hours…