The Entire Family Is Sick

That's right. The entire family. This means that my wife, usually the anchor of our little family, is also struggling, so you should expect our house to undergo a supernova event sometime soon.

It actually started two weeks ago. My wife caught a light cold at that time, but managed to beat it back. It was mild and she thought she was in the clear. Then last Saturday, my oldest caught something that gave him a dry, hacking cough, mild headaches, and a slight runny nose. A the time, we thought it was the same thing as what my wife had. That Tuesday, my son ended up coming home early from school, and we kept him home on Wednesday; his cough was incessant.

Come Monday evening, I was showing similar symptoms, and they quickly got worse. I ended up taking two sick days from work, an extremely rare occurrence, but I was home from work since Tuesday (I worked from home when I felt up to it). My symptoms manifested themselves as an exaggerated version of my son's -- without so much of the headaches.

Tuesday, my youngest had a runny nose, but the cough wouldn't come 'til Thursday. Wednesday, my daughter finally manifested symptoms, staying home from school Thursday and Friday.

Then the real blow to our family came last night. My wife, whom I had figured had navigated the shallow reefs of this sickness without running afoul, started showing symptoms last night. This dispelled two of our assumptions: that what the rest of the family had was the same thing she had two weeks ago, and that she would make it through without catching it.

It is typical for our family to pass any and all sicknesses around to each other, and in a way, this apparently quite contagious strain of ... whatever ... has done us a favor by getting us all sick simultaneously -- this way we shouldn't be passing it around and prolonging the misery.

Hopefully we'll all be over it and healthy by Christmas, assuming we don't catch something else. All the kids seem mostly better, though the cough is lingering for all of them, worst of all in my daughter. I feel somewhat better, but still tired and my cough is lingering, too.

So now my poor wife has to face up to this cold. She's supposed to sing two Christmas songs in church tomorrow, but she may not even be able to talk by then, let alone sing, if the cold progresses as it did for me. I'm hoping she beats it faster than I have been. She usually does; I think it's a Mommy superpower. Nevertheless, it's over-optimistic that she'll be okay for tomorrow, and I'm going to encourage her to plan accordingly.