Pray This Cup Doesn't Runneth Over

Last Friday, Miss Bea came home from day care in a sunny mood that rapidly deteriorated into an almost unbearable grumpiness which could not be appeased no matter what we did. She'd grab her bot, take a sip, fling it back onto the table, and reach for it again two minutes later. Nothing we put on her tray made her happy except the can of mandarin oranges. Knowing what I know of toddler diets, I tend to go with what works, providing I'm not feeding her Happy Meals every night or dishing up a Doner kebab into her bowl with an avuncular wink. Toddlers are pretty primal creatures, and if all they want to eat is a bowl of mandarin oranges and a few graham crackers, then by gum you let them because if you try to force something else into them, you will probably pay a heavy price involving copious pints of bodily fluids.

That's my theory, anyway, and it's what I'm going with, lest I tell you the story of a kid we knew who would tip the entire contents of the salt cellar into his eager gullet several times a day (and during the night, if he could get away with it), causing an alarming amount of distress for his mother. Eventually she took him to the doctor who, upon extensive testing, discovered the kid had a weird-ass metabolic disorder that left his body absolutely shrieking for salt to function. Toddlers will eat what their bodies tell them to eat, providing you're smart about it, and they're good at regulating themselves, much better (it has to be said) than most adults.

At any rate, immediately after her bath (where she spent the whole time screeching, kvetching, and generally being a pain in the tail), hubby got puked on as he held her. Not just a little spit up but a full on abominable voorheave which soaked his shirt and trickled down his side onto his shorts. A few seconds later, Bea beaned up again, a sort of emetic aftershock, and produced even more partially digested mandarin oranges which, as vomit goes, weren't too bad coming back up. Better than, say, a dairy product.

As we scrambled to get her washed off in the tub and tried to jam the little bits of orange down the drain, hubby changed clothes, gagging loudly, and I threw everything into the washing machine. I had a really bad feeling this wasn't over because aside from riding the Tilt A Whirl too long, kids NEVER puke just once. It's sort of a golden rule of thumb with parenting, and if you get to the Seasoned Veteran stage, like I have, you can tell by the smell of puke what sort of stomach upset you quite literally have on your hands.

Don't wince. Dealing with puke is part of the parenting game, and in any domestic arrangement, you'll find one parent who can handle puke pretty well but can't handle other stuff. Hubby's one of those who once he smells barf, it's all over--he gags and soon he's hugging the loo. Puke doesn't get to me like that, but snot does. The mere sight of a snot bulb makes my palms sweat and my ears ring, so, as I say, these things get divided out the parenting catch match against rogue viruses.

Being parenting veterans, as I mentioned above, we wrapped Bea up in a beach towel and sat on the sofa down in the basement watching some telly. The beach towel served several functions: it was thick and absorbent, it kept her warm and cocooned, and we have about 4 of them, so when she hurked three more times, it wasn't any big deal to toss the dripping one into the wash and yoink another.

As hubby sat holding our dry-heaving child, I dug around our medicine drawer in Bea's bathroom and found a Vomacur suppository left over from our battle with Noro virus a few months back. Now I'm crediting you good people with rather sharp powers of intuition, and you can pretty much tell by the name of that drug what it does. I insert the medicine right up Bea's corn chute, and it took effect about 40 minutes later. She was able to sleep through the night and woke up slightly paler but back to her squawky, cheerful self the next day.

I thought we were in the clear. The moment she started puking I went into Germ Lockdown Mode--washing my hands every time I touched her or anything to do with her, putting everything she'd used to eat into the wash and sterilising her tray, washing all her barfed-on clothes on a scalding cycle, the works. I even told Max to take an early bed time and in no way was he to touch her or any of her toys. I was Germ Warfare Superfly, folks.

Things went along the rest of the weekend, and we all settled in for a nice sleep on Sunday night. I was certain that we'd beaten back this bug and settled onto my air mattress with a rather smug sense of satisfaction. No germ was gonna get ME, boy howdy.

Fate, that temperamental bitch-goddess, wasn't quite through with us.

Around 3.30 that morning, hubby awoke me by coming into my bed room (we're sleeping separately at the mo because of his snoring) and flipping on the overhead light. I thought he was going to ask for help with Bea, as he had pulled Bea Duty that night (we swap off during the week), and I thought maybe Bea had been demanding or loud, and he wanted some help. I was poised to leap off the air mattress and go deal with her, as this happens often, but I got other news.

Hubby squatted down next to me and said, "I've been puking since midnight, and I can't seem to stop. I'm pretty sure I'm puking blood. I think I need to go to the hospital. Look..." and before I was even awake enough to resist, he thrust a plastic cup, the sort you get at football games, under my nose and told me to take a look.

It was a cup full of puke, my friends. Red and full of white floaty chunks. In my face at 3.30 in the morning.

I said the one thing I could think of at that moment. "Blood? Are you serious?"

I'm not a gastroenterologist and I will never play one on TV. I do know, however, that if you're chucking up an entire stomach's worth of red, it's probably not blood but something you ate, particularly if you had no signs of a health problem 6 hours hence. Your gut just does not start dumping units of blood into your stomach with no feeling of something being slightly amiss on your part. In short, it just don't add up.

Blinking blearily up at him, I said, "I'm sorry you've been sick, hon. But...what did you eat today??"

He looked slightly offended that I didn't exclaim, "OH MY GOD! BLOOD! CALL AN AMBULANCE APACE!" Twisting his mouth to one side, he didn't say anything.

"Hon, we had lasagna for dinner," I reminded him in a calming tone. "I remember that. And you had a plum for dessert, yes?"

A nod.

"What'd you eat for lunch?"

Pizza and a bowl full of purple grapes.

Sweet sister of Fatima. I may have dyscalculia, but I can put these numbers together pretty easily. The reason I was a bit sceptical was because not two days earlier I'd nearly scared myself into cardiac arrest when I peeled Bea's nappy off to discover her caca full of bright red bits. A little reflection reminded me that she'd eaten about 9 cherry tomatoes the day before, and I let the often-ignored logic center of my brain take over for once.

Tomato skins will give you red poops. Purple grapes will give you purplish poops (I found that one out a day after I discovered Bea will devour a bowl of grapes if you let her). Plums will do the same. And blueberries will yield a poo that's shockingly dark but harmless. I'm not proud of my education in matters scattalogical, but when it comes to kids and worried husbands, it's a point of pride. I know from poop and puke, and neither one really rattles my cage.

So for the past three days, I've had a cup full of red puke sitting on the top shelf of my fridge. It's sealed up with a bit of cling film and an elastic, but still, when you open the door, you can SEE the outline of it in the cup, and you KNOW it's there, like a snake watching you hungrily from behind a glass partition. And no matter what logical tact I took with hubby, he remained convinced that he'd puked up blood and wanted his barf tested.

"Maybe I have an ulcer" he remarked, almost hopefully, the next day.

Though my brain screamed, Are you fucking kidding me?? If anyone around here gets an ulcer, it's gonna be me, boy-o..., I replied in a very straightforward voice, "Do you have a burning sensation in your gut an hour after you eat?" (no). "Is your poop black all the time?" (it was kinda the other night...) "Do you have crippling stomach cramps and acid reflux that antacids can't even touch?" (no) "Then it's not an ulcer, honey. Let it go."

Hubby called up his new doctor and explained to the nurse that he'd saved his puke and wanted it to be put through some lab tests "to double-check it's okay". I really could not imagine what that sort of test would be called (a street pizza panel, perhaps?). The nurse said she could not book an appointment that day but could give him one on Thursday. Hubby then asked if he could just swing by with his cup of ralph and have it tested real quick for blood. I guess he was thinking someone could merely dunk a bit of litmus paper in or something, and the results would be more or less immediate. I would love to have seen the look on that nurse's face when she heard him make that request, but to her credit, her voice gave away nothing.

So this morning, hubby set off for the doc's, cup on the seat beside him, and had his barf examined by the doctor who told him that if blood were present, it wouldn't be such a uniform colour, that it would be more clotty and dark, not the colour of cherry Jell-O and full of what was clearly undigested bits of cottage cheese from the lasagna and bits of grape skin.

I appreciate hubby's need to have his worries eased, but I would like someone out there to tell me, in as many words as they wish, how wonderful a wife I am for not laughing in his face or doing the I Told You So dance right in front of him. Because I really do deeply love this man and want him to have both physical and mental well-being, but I want some kind of recognition for a) being woken up from a sound sleep to look at someone's upchuck (and then suffering from a milder version of the same stomach bug myself for the next 12 hours), and b) laying eyes upon a cup of barf every time I opened my own fridge and not uttering a word of complaint. Please.

And as you're telling me these wonderful things, you'll have to speak up because I'll be at the kitchen sink, scrubbing out a plastic cup with hot water and all the bleach I can find.