The Week of the Purell Pump

It feels a little like I'm tempting fate to assert that The Virus has finally left our house. However, after two whole days without any noxious bodily fluids befowling the floors, beds, furniture, linens, or clothes of this house or its occupants, I'm willing to risk a bold statement. The Virus has left our house! We are well people!!!

I had many fun plans laid out for this past week. Our family was just completing a trip to New Mexico, where my husband attended a training and my sister, brother-in-law, and their two children joined us for the adventure. We stayed a couple nights in Albuquerque at the end of the trip; my brother-in-law flew back to Pennsylvania and, in order to prolong the fun of family togetherness, my mother arrived from Baltimore. She, my sister, and the kids were going to return with us to our home, where we planned to have a wonderful time watching the four cousins interact and exploring the Hopi Reservation.

The first inkling that the week might not go entirely according to plan came when Papaya awakened last Saturday morning in the hotel room crib, covered in diarrhea up to his armpits. Despite this inauspicious beginning to the weekend, Papaya seemed to rally and had a good day - he ate well, napped for 3 hours straight, and seemed happy and healthy. We thought it was a just a reaction to tiredness, a fond hope that shattered the next morning when Papaya vomited banana all over his father and continued to vomit every 10 minutes or so for the next few hours (sometimes, for variety's sake, the vomiting would be punctuated with diarrhea). The fun plans I had for our 4-hour drive home that day began to evaporate.

Papaya is usually an extremely active toddler who seems to radiate energy. Within a few hours that Sunday morning, we saw him deteriorate into a limp child who could barely sit up. His retching was so violent that he tore his esophagus and began to vomit blood. As we started our trip home, my husband was so worried that he called in a prescription for an anti-emetic to the Walmart pharmacy in Gallup, a town we would pass through in 2 hours. As you can imagine, it was a delightful drive. In an effort to keep our 6-month old, Banana, uncontaminated, I became the "clean" person (driving and dealing with Banana) and my husband, stocked up with paper napkins and styrofoam cups from the motel, became the "dirty" person (dealing with Papaya and his by-products).

Unfortunately, Papaya's virus wasn't the only thing we had to deal with during that unforgettable trip home. We had chosen to travel during a weekend of unseasonal snowstorms blanketing the Southwest. The brilliant blue sky of Albuquerque quickly turned dark and threatening, and the snow falling from the sky combined with the snow blowing across the interstate (the winds were upwards of 35 MPH) to create some decidedly unfavorable driving conditions, even white-out in places. In fact, it was so bad that the police closed I-40 in one place, creating a complete stand-still. Our feelings of desperation ran so deep that I, mild-mannered, law-abiding driver that I usually am, piloted our overloaded Corolla across the snowy interstate median (at a pretty good pace, hoping not to get stuck), drove back to a previous exit, and navigated a side road until we saw the interstate traffic moving again. Even with this daring move, it was a tortuous four hour drive to Gallup.

At the Superwalmart, my husband toted Papaya off post-haste to the pharmacy, procured the anti-vomiting suppositories, and headed off the bathroom to do the fun work of clean-up and medicine administration. I breastfed Banana and desperately tried to think of what groceries I would need to buy to get us through the next two weeks until we made it to a grocery store again. My mom, sister, and two kids did their own shopping & settled down for a snack at McDonalds. After a two-hour stop (during which we all had something to eat and Papaya was able to keep some Pedialyte down, perking him up considerably), we were finally on our way again. By this time, it was 4:30, and we were beginning to realize that we would have to drive in the dark across the reservation, something we try to avoid if possible.

As it turns out, driving in the dark was the least of our worries during the tense hours that followed. After more stop-and-go on I-40, we finally left it for a reservation road whose condition deteriorated from fairly clear to completely covered with two or three inches of snow. Then, to make matters much worse, just as the sun went down, we drove into a blizzard-like snowstorm. "It feels like we're a milkshake inside a blender," my sister aptly observed. For the first time that day, I started to feel really worried. "How could this drive possibly get any worse?" I thought - but then realized that there were many ways it could get worse, and prayed again that we could get home safely. We were well into the Navajo reservation by this time, and pretty isolated.

Finally, after crawling along at about 20 miles an hour for a long time (I was afraid to go faster because we could hardly see, and afraid to go slower because I didn't want to get stuck), we came to the town of Ganado. There isn't much in Ganado besides a gas station, but it was nice to at least feel safe for awhile. We stopped at the gas station (which was actually closing its little store because the snow was so bad) for a bathroom/baby feeding/catching our breath break. In the half hour we were there, our cars got covered with two or three inches of the driving snow, our license plates unreadable. There were still about 60 miles between us and our house, and things were not looking good. If Ganado had any motels, we probably would have given in and stayed for the night. But there was absolutely no place to stay, so with prayers and hope we headed off into the snow and the isolation again. At least the Papaya had stopped vomiting by this time. (He started wailing for food, which we didn't want to give him much of at that point. His screams joined his sister's screams of protest at being strapped into the car seat again and made for some jolly noise.)

Finally, something went right - within 15 minutes, the snow stopped, and within a half hour, we could see stars and the beautiful almost-full moon. The road became clearer and clearer until suddenly, right about the point that we entered the Hopi reservation, we were driving on dry tarmac and could actually go the speed limit. With great thankfulness and a profound sense of relief, we pulled into our driveway a little after 9:00 - the normal 4-5 hour trip had taken more than ten hours.

We thought it was over. We were wrong.

The next morning, my sweet husband woke up with tummy cramps that quickly escalated into nausea and diarrhea. The crazy man went to work, where he took an anti-emetic that curbed the nausea but made him incredibly sleepy. I can't believe he interacted with patients all day! I felt progressively worse throughout the day and spent a miserable night dealing with nausea and vomiting. The next night, my four-year-old niece vomited all over her bed (and throughout the night), and the following evening, after yet another night-time bed-covering vomit by the Papaya, my mother succumed. After this, we hoped we had seen the last of it, but Papaya continued sick; the next night (Thursday), his crib was again the victim of a violent attack of gastro-enteritis. Between the vomit and the catastrophic diarrhea explosions, we did 6 or 7 loads of laundry a day. Thank goodness for washing machines, bleach, and Purell. Our little pump of hand sanitizer was a hot commodity and we were all lucky that our hands didn't dry up and fall off! Happily, my sister never came down with it, and both babies (Banana and my sister's 3 month old) were spared - either a testament to the magic of breastfeeding, a similar bug my sister had in January, the obsessive cleaning measures, or all three.

On Friday, the family was tired but - for the most part - continent. On Saturday, we were just tired. Finally, on Sunday, everybody was feeling a bit more themselves and we actually had a delightful day - "incandescently lovely" was my mother's description of it - and compared to the rest of the week, I would have to agree.

Yesterday (Monday) everybody left. I can't say the visit was all that I had hoped for, although it was surely more memorable than if we had done everything I envisioned! We did enjoy being together, and there was a certain esprit de corps in working together against The Virus. And there was at least as much love as vomit flying around!