Swine Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest................

Well, we've got the swine flu. In our family, though, the swine flu was about as inevitable as a Mike Tyson airport altercation (but in this case, can you blame him? And of all the people to stick a camera in their face, you pick Mike Tyson? While he's walking in the airport with his 10 month old daughter? What did you expect would happen?). But the swine flu? Seriously? I was about as shocked to hear that Jaxon had the swine flu as I was when I came downstairs to find Rach ripping the carpet off of the stairs. She had no explanation or anything. Just, "I hate this stupid carpet on these stairs." Which got me thinking; it must be nice to be her. To be able to immediately remedy anything that you don't like at any given time. Don't like the carpet in the downstairs bedroom? Pull it up. Don't like the paint in the bathroom? Start painting it at 11:30 pm. Don't like the way the front door squeaks? Just rip it off the hinges. Don't like your husband's camouflage shorts? Just throw them away. Don't like his sleeveless tuxedo T-shirt? Just hide it from him forever. One of these days, someone is going to tell Racheal that she can't do something, and I do NOT want to be there when that happens. One time, I tried to explain to her how we're all bound by the laws of gravity, and she shoved an ice pick up my nose and said, "Oh yeah? Where's the gravity on this ice pick, huh? Where's your stupid gravity now?" Okay, maybe that didn't happen. But you don't know for sure that it didn't happen. All I know is that I'm fairly certain as soon as Rach gets our house to look the way she wants it to look; it'll be time to move. I've already resigned myself to this.

Okay. I'm done. Back to the swine flu. So Jaxon was sick a couple of weeks ago, but the doctor said it was just an upper respiratory infection, not the flu. He was on antibiotics for a week, and seemingly got better. But then when I picked him up from school on Monday, he was running a pretty bad fever. His teacher said that he hadn't been acting like himself all day long, but that, coincidentally, his behavior was better than it had ever been. Yay fever! Then Monday night the fever got up to about 105º. Poor little guy. It's such a helpless feeling when your 2 year old is sick and you can't do anything about it. I imagine it's a lot like what Chris Paul is going through this year.

But other than the fever, Jax seemed fine. At about 1:30 am, Rach was on the phone with the on-call doctor, and Jaxon woke up and overheard Rach say something about going to the hospital, so he very happily says, "Yay! Let's go hospital! We go hospital, Daddy!" But then immediately fell back asleep. It was very Abe Simpson-ish. So Rach took him to the doctor Tuesday morning, and they confirmed that it was, in fact, swine flu. No big surprise though. Our house is basically like a damn Petri dish. Jaxon is in daycare all day with 15 other snot-nosed kids and the other kids go to school with 300 other snot-nosed kids. Short of keeping them lathered in Purel, there's not a whole lot we can do to keep them bacteria-free all day long. (I know these things, I'm studying to become a doctor.) But the good thing about living in near 3rd world conditions is that our immune systems are pretty much rock solid. Jaxon's body just laughed at the swine flu. His fever broke Tuesday afternoon, and he's been fine ever since. I'm convinced that all of us have already had the swine flu at some point. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if we were all carriers of the ebola virus too. We might even be combining existing diseases in our house and making new superdiseases. It's gotten so bad that The WHO (That's the World Health Organization, not these guys) sent us a shipment of mosquito nets just to be safe. So bad that all of the cockroaches had to move out of our house because they were all getting sick. Hey, You don't know that it didn't happen.


Here's a sick Jaxon waiting for his prescription at Publix:

After Jax left, the chair at Publix started coughing