Viral: Updated

Alternate titles for this posting:
SuperBug
The House of Bile
Don't Come Visit Us
BiCoastal Deluge

We have been hit and we've been hit hard. Saturday, we met K & A's father and said a sad good-bye. I wasn't feeling too well, but just thought maybe I had gotten a little car sick from turning around and talking with the girls. Everyone else seemed to be fine. I wasn't really hungry, so I just got a salad for lunch. I breastfed the girls and we headed off on our three hour drive home.

About an hour into the trip home I dumped the contents of my vinyl pumping bag onto the floor of the car and hurled my guts into it. I kept this up every ten to fifteen minutes for the rest of the ride home. About an hour from home Mazie threw up. About ten minutes from home Lucia threw up. About thirty minutes after arriving home H threw up. Elliott held out until the next morning with vomiting though he did start the other end sooner. We also were afraid that Lucia had swallowed or breathed in some of her vomit when she threw up in her car seat.

H luckily had the foresight to call for assistance. About twenty minutes from home she called Donna to meet us at the house to bring me some medicine and to help H get the babies in the house since I would be of no help. By the time she got there the girls were throwing up more and H started getting sick. She called her husband Terry and she called H's Aunt Patti who is a nurse. So within thirty minutes we had Donna, Terry, Aunt Patti, and Uncle Chip here to help. I do not know what we would have done without their help. We were in dire circumstances. H also called her mom to come home from the Gulf. She got here about eleven o'clock and spent the night. So, there were five people here in shifts throughout the night to help (remember that number for later). Aunt Patti checked Lucia's lungs several times over the next 24 hours and they were always clear.

So, we have been battling something bad. My bi-Coastal situation lasted about eight hours, H's about the same. It came on rapidly and violently. I was better Sunday though, while H never got out of bed. I don't think either of us have ever been that violently ill.

The babies did not seem to have as rough of a time as H and me. There have been times they have not felt great and they are sleeping more, but for the most part they have done fairly well. Their eyes are definitely sickly. They are still having diarrhea today, but no one has thrown up for over a day now. They are eating fairly well and do not seem to have gotten dehydrated at all.

To illustrate how bad off I was, my girls were throwing up and I could not do anything. I heard voices from the family room saying, "Hold her up, hold her up, hold her over it, hold her over it, now rub her back, rub her back." For me not to be giving directions when my two precious girls were so sick requires me to be incapacitated. One time Elliott was so upset. He was in the nursery. Two different people had tried to rock him to sleep. He was tired and with different people and didn't feel well. He really had gotten really upset. So, I lugged myself out of bed to try to rock him. I was only able to rock him for about a minute before I had to go throw up again.

So I definitely feel we are on the mend. However, as we are on the mend, the wonderful people who came to our aid are not faring so well. Donna and Terry are very sick, as are H's mom and stepdad. Aunt Patti was not feeling well yesterday. So, that means that of the six people that saw us the first 24 hours of our bug, four are violently ill and one does not feel well.

Updated: Uncle Chip has now come down with the mess. So really only Aunt Patti escaped our plague, and she is a nurse so she probably has an immune system made of steel.

I'd say this is one nasty virus. We hope you don't get it.