Momma Said: When Daddy is Sick

Here’s a little nugget I found while looking through some old files. I probably never ran it because my husband reads the newspaper but almost never reads the blog. I like to bait him on occasion to see if he’s lurking around but he never is. Don’t tell on me, OK?

I call my husband every day around 5:30 to see when he expects to be home, so I can have dinner ready or to tell him to pick up a pizza on his way home, depending on how my day has gone. Recently I called to check in with him and let him know dinner was hot and ready to eat.

“I may not eat,” he said.

“Why?”

“My stomach is killing me, I ate an orange a couple of hours ago and I’m having terrible stomach pains.”

Now I realize there is a stomach virus going around and that he is grown man with a history of acid reflux triggered by citrus fruits, but I’ve also been married to him for almost twelve years. He said “orange” but I sniffed a deeper story.

“What did you eat for lunch?”

“Sardines in hot sauce….”

“Ah-ha…so it was the orange that upset your stomach, not the canned fish in hot sauce…”

“Well, maybe it was the fish.”

I told you I know this man. When our second child was five months old, she contracted a stomach virus so terrible it put her in the hospital for three days. I contracted the virus while we were in the hospital. I was breastfeeding my recovering infant who had an IV in her arm and I was simultaneously puking into a trash can. This incident resulted in our family’s departure from a traditional pediatrician to a family doctor, because whilst I was vomiting, Emma’s doctor came in to the room to tell me she would be ready for discharge in twelve hours, if she could continue to keep her milk down.

I pulled my head out of the garbage can, wiped my mouth and said, “That’s great. Can you do anything to help me?” He suggested I go to the ER and sign in as a patient as he was NOT my doctor. I wanted to ask him if he could babysit for the next twelve hours while I was treated in the ER, but instead just thanked him for his time and never went to see him again.

Twelve hours later my husband came to pick us up from the hospital. He had been running back and forth from work, to the hospital, to my friend Gena’s house, where we had stashed our oldest child. He came up to Emma’s room to help me gather our belongings and I noticed he looked a little green around the gills.

“Babe, you alright?” I asked him

“Yeah, I’m OK. I haven’t had a lot to eat today.”

We made it to the patient pick-up area in front of the huge university hospital and were loading the car when my husband looked at me with panic in his eyes and stated very matter of factly, “I’m gonna puke. Where do I go?”

I pointed to the bushes and he ran. I waited in the car for him, and as he buckled his seat belt he said, “I knew I shouldn’t have eaten those canned peaches.”

Ex-squeeze me? Say WHO?

“What in the world do you mean?”

“I ate a can of peaches for lunch because it’s all I could find and I thought they tasted funny. I think I got food poisoning…”

“HONEY! Are you serious? It couldn’t be the debilitating stomach virus that just ripped through our family, could it?”

So you see, he said “orange” and I was a bit suspicious. This particular day I had been in my workout clothes since ten o’clock in the morning and asked if he could lie on the couch and watch Spongebob with our kids for thirty minutes so I could take a quick walk around the neighborhood. (Seeing as how folks around town like to ask me if I’m expecting…)

“Just lay here for thirty minutes and I’ll put them in bed when I get back, OK?”

He agreed. I returned from my walk to find him sitting on the couch with the baby and the two older girls in bed and calling to me from the bedroom. I went to go give the big girls good night kisses and Aubrey, my four year old begged me to read a book.

“Honey, I can’t. Daddy has a tummy ache and I need to go get Baby Sadie from him so he can lie down and rest.”

“Not anymore Momma, he ate chocolate cake and made it feel all better.”