Is it Funny Yet? Swine Flu and Miscellaneous Grossness.

My mother-in-law has a saying "Time + Tragedy= Humor." I'm not sure if enough time has passed for all this to be exactly funny yet, but at least some of the memories bring a wry smile and a shake of the head. I suppose that is close enough.

Our family was sick the second week of school. The week after that, everyone was healthy except Camille, who still had a lingering cough. In spite of it, she kept up her somewhat difficult schedule which sometimes kept her at school from 7am until after 5pm. When you add in eating, bathing, Young Womens and piano, she'd sometimes be left with 20 minutes to do her 2 hours worth of homework.

So, we weren't too surprised that Camille was exhausted and still coughing when we left for Idaho that Friday afternoon to go to my nephew Lyle's wedding. We were just happy she could sleep in the car, since we didn't get in to Rexburg until after midnight.

The wedding was nice. We changed our clothes in Mom's hotel room in Idaho Falls before leaving for the rest of the festivities in Blackfoot. I think this is where things started to fall apart. There we discovered that Cam didn't have any clothes to change into, which would have left him in his Sunday clothes for the rest of a very long day. We didn't realize it then, but Camille also left her backpack in the hotel room.

The wedding luncheon was very tasty. Cam was thrilled with the new shorts and shirt we bought him at the Blackfoot Wal-mart. Natalie fell asleep in the van, so we parked in the shade and let her sleep in her carseat through the luncheon. Things were looking up . . . we thought.

After wasting several hours just wandering around, we went to the church in Blackfoot where the reception was being held. Max didn't fall out of the tree he kept climbing. A definite plus! And if Camille didn't have her backpack and had to attend the reception in shorts, well, at least they were cute shorts. We were even happy when she sacked out on the couch in the church's lobby. She was so worn down that we'd been worried about her all week. We were just happy she was sleeping.

The bride's mother is from Thailand and made amazing Thai food for the reception. Brett gave Cameron a mouthful of noodles, which Cam kept there, refusing to swallow. Brett gave him a drink of water to wash the noodles down. Cameron just stored in cheeks along with the noodles. It wasn't until I was alone with him and Natalie at a table full of strangers that Cameron got rid of the noodles. He didn't swallow them.

He sneezed.

You can imagine what that was like. Fortunately, he was facing away from the other reception guests when the mingled noodles, water and snot rocketed onto the wood floor. I had just finished wiping it up when I heard Cameron start to gag. I jumped up just in time to catch some of the vomit in my hand, keeping the worst of it off the chair and Cam's clothes. My understandably horrified table companions quickly pointed out the empty cup by my elbow and I got rid of my handful. I quickly found someone to hand Natalie to and started cleaning up this new and much grosser mess. Meanwhile, Cameron sat calmly in his seat and resumed eating his brownie, as if nothing had ever happened.

As the night wore on, Camille woke up and joined the rest of the family at one of the tables. She seemed to feel a little better. Brett took Cam and Natalie to the nursery where he got to read a book and they got to be very loud and run around as they wished. Things were looking up again. I guess I should have known better.

Brett was walking around with Natalie on his shoulders as the reception came to a close. He looked so handsome in his new suit, shirt and tie, all of which he was wearing for the first time. Suddenly he realized something is very wrong. Natalie had blown out of her diaper, ruining her dress, Brett's jacket collar, tie and even shirt collar. So, Brett ended the evening in his suit pants, dress shoes and a t-shirt.

We were so happy to get back into Rexburg and see our beds! Then, in the middle of the night, we could hear Camille moaning in her sleep. When I went to check on her, she was burning up. I got her some medicine and spent the rest of the night sleepless and worrying that she had pneumonia.

She still felt terrible the next morning, but didn't seem to have breathing problems. So, we dosed her up and began the seven hour trip, Camille coughing the whole way in that enclosed space.

Monday morning I called for a doctor's appointment for her. They were too busy to get us in until Tuesday morning. I knew it wasn't pneumonia at this point, but thought she may have developed some other kind of infection from her long illness.

By Monday night we understood the real story as Max and Elise suddenly found themselves with headaches, high fevers, body aches and congestion.

Camille didn't have an infection. She had a new bug. Swine flu.

With everyone cooped up in the van on that trip, we didn't have a prayer. All the kids had it by Tuesday morning.

The test for swine flu is a very long cotton swab shoved deeply into the nose (maybe the brain by the way it looked). It is very uncomfortable and the nurses hate testing the kids. So, the pediatrician only tested one of them. Max was the lucky winner of the brain swab. He said it was worse than a shot.

The doctor warned us that Max's test could come back negative because it is difficult to get a good sample. Apparently, there is a 25% false negative rate. Whatever the result, she has seen so many cases of this that she was certain without the test. The test did come back negative, but she didn't change her diagnosis, especially since we knew Camille had been exposed to a confirmed case at Young Womens the week before.

It was a very, very long week with all of us quarantined in the house together. Everybody got pretty testy and cabin fever was at an all-time high. Brett was at work all week. Saturday he ran the Colbert half marathon, took Max shooting, attended priesthood session and then went into work. By Saturday night I was certifiably insane.

We are very fortunate that with our family's history of asthma that no one was sicker than they were. We were also fortunate that Brett and I didn't get it. The kids were sick and miserable, but I've seen them much sicker than that.

So, I suppose all's well that ends well. There's always a silver lining, right? No H1N1 vaccine for our family . . . we got our immunity the natural way!