When It Rains, It Pours

Do you ever get the feeling that you're on Candid Camera? That things are just getting so out of hand that the only way for it to make sense is if there's a bunch of people snickering at you from behind a wall? I'm getting a little bit of that right now.

See, this gastro bug is decimating my family. First I had it, then my mom and Emily. In fact, we even had a dehydrated Emily in ER on Saturday for 4 hrs. of IV hydration. Now my brother's got it, and we think Benjamin is starting too, although with him it's hard to say if it's gastro or chemo. The one thing I know for sure is that his poop is being tested for C Difficile (a boy down the hall has already tested positive - aack!). On top of this, my father's going to the Jewish General for daily rounds of IV antibiotics for an infection in his elbow, and is seeing the Infectious Diseases specialist tomorrow to find out what's going on. My father-in-law is banged up from a fall down his front steps, and was stung twice in his on-going war against the wasps living above his mail box. Oh, and my younger sister-in-law had an abscess on her neck drained.

If you care at all for your health please, please stay away from us right now! We seem to be collectively covered by this cloud of germs and bad luck. I'm sure that within a week we'll all be back to normal and laughing (heck, I already am - hysterically). But right now the gods of vacation are doing their darnedest to make sure Roger's time off this week is wasted. This was the week we were supposed to be in Nova Scotia visiting our friends. Benjamin's diagnosis scuttled that, but our friends decided to come here instead so that Emily and their kids could still have some kind of vacation together. So guess who's kids developed fevers this afternoon after playing with Emily, while Emily's gastro looks like it's making a comeback. I'm telling you, STAY AWAY!! We're poison!!

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Other than that, everything is fine. Benjamin continues to amaze the doctors and nurses with his strength and powers of recovery. You really would never know by looking at him how serious his condition is. His hair is starting to shed again, and he still is not drinking anything except his morning bottle. But he still feasts on his baby food jars, alleviating fears that they would need to insert the feeding tube which most other kids on the floor have. On the floor Benjamin is unstoppable (as long as we keep his IV machine moving with him). He's taken to sleeping on his stomach with his face pressed into the bed and his bum high in the air. He's also becoming a TV addict, but I'm trying to limit him to PBS Kids and HGTV. Hopefully in a couple of weeks he'll be allowed out of the room and into the rest of the ward. Until then, we have the perfect room in which to stand at the door and look down the hallway at all the comings and goings.

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So really, other than this curse of bad health, we're doing great. On that note I will sign off, before the computer shorts out and I get a bad shock and then bang my head falling out of my chair. Shh, I think I hear snickering.