Not Since Chemo

So, my family has been battling the stomach flu for several days this past week. My husband had it first. He complained of upset stomach and didn’t want to eat anything for 3 days. He had stomach-flu-like symptoms without actually being “sick.”  Me, on the other hand, sick, sick, sick. I haven’t been this sick since I was treating with chemotherapy. Only this time, I didn’t have the really good drugs to help with the nausea.

What was really odd is how quickly I became violently ill. No warning. No gurgly stomach, no bloating or pains, just woke up around 6:30 and BAM, throwing up like nobody’s business. I couldn’t believe how fast I went from sleeping to vomiting. So weird. And I vomited, violently, about every 45 minutes for 9 hours. I couldn’t even keep a sip of water down.

This resulted in severe dehydration. Shakes, and body aches, cramps in my feet. I tried to eat some soda crackers but I didn’t even have enough saliva to swallow one tiny corner of the cracker. Fortunately, by this time, my husband was more or less over his symptoms so he went to the store and got me some ginger ale and Pedialyte, which I managed to keep down for a few minutes.

It was nasty stuff. I spent one entire day in bed and parts of the second day laying down. No real food was consumed for about 3 days. At least I was finally able to keep some liquids in me so the dehydration symptoms went away. And I finally took a risk and downed a Naproxen for the body aches. That helped tremendously.

On a positive note, one of my new kitties, my sweet little Cosmo, didn’t leave my side for almost 24 hours. She was apparently worried about me. She kept crawling up on my chest and patting my face with her little paw. Then she would lay there and purr and purr and purr. Every time I got up and ran to the toilet, she waited patiently for me to crawl back in bed, then repeated the process of snuggling up on my chest and patting my face.

My husband assured me she had left a couple of times to eat and drink and use the little box, but every time I woke up, there she was. I love our new babies so much! So weird how they “know” things right?

How do you guys cope with being really sick? Is there a stomach flu bug going around? Any suggestions for dealing with dehydration? I think that was worse than actually throwing up.

I’ve got more exciting things planned for the rest of year that only my newsletter followers will know about. I promise you’ll only get 6 newsletters for the entire year, so I won’t clutter up your inbox. Here’s the link if you want to sign up and be the first to know things: http://bit.ly/JansenSchmidtNewsletter

Word of the Day: Jocose

Fun fact about me: I’m going to count the sick day as an ab work-out day because, man, my stomach sure hurt from heaving.

Original post by Jansen Schmidt, October 2022. Images by Google