Germs ARE the Enemy

August 20, 2009

Last week the kids started school. By Friday, Luke was sick with a sore throat. Sunday night Emma started complaining of her throat hurting. Monday night I was stricken with the sore throat virus. Today Jason is also home sick with the evil bug. Five days at school was all it took for the whole family to get sick. Awesome.

For the most part, the kids are better. Jason doesn't think he has as bad a case of it. As is my custom, I took the virus and ran with it. I had to go to Dr. Sinus today because the stuff coming out of my nose had taken on some shades of Christmas-time.

The great thing about Dr. Sinus is that you don't have to have an appointment. There weren't that many people in the waiting room when I got there, and there weren't too awful many cars in the parking lot, so I knew it probably wouldn't be that long a wait. I was kept entertained by a cute little girl who asked, no, demanded to know the names of every person in that room. (Her name was Marley. She was almost 3.) Every one that came in was required to have a conversation with Marley. She made sure of that.

Maybe I'm weird this way, but before I go to the doctor's office, no matter how sick I am, I take a shower, get dressed, and even put on make-up. Today it was mostly just concealer to hide the dark circles under my eyes and powder to hide how red my nose is, as well as mascara and lipstick, so that I didn't look completely dead.

In contrast, I saw not one, but TWO twenty-something year old women in the waiting room wearing their pajamas. One was decked out in matching Tweety Bird lounge pants, shirt, and fuzzy black slippers. The other was slightly more conservative, but was obviously wearing jammies. When did this become acceptable? Yes, I will admit to dropping the kids off in the mornings at school wearing jammies (only last year--I've managed to dress every morning so far this school year), but I have never set foot out of the car in them, much less gone to a doctor's office or anywhere else in public. I could see it if they were so stricken that they had to make an ER visit, but if they are well enough to drive themself to a doctor's office, it seems to me that they could've, at the very least, put on sweats and tennis shoes or flip flops! The fuzzy slippers sent me over the edge. If Marley hadn't been asking me (for the 3rd time) what my name was, I totally would've laughed at the Tweety-bird-and-fuzzy-slipper wearing-girl.

Later I went to Wal-Mart to pick up some ingredients for vegetable soup for tonight's dinner. I remembered that Emma needed new socks, so I was browsing through the sock aisle when this man comes at me on a motorized scooter. I kept edging to the left to try to keep from being run over when I saw a woman on a scooter coming at me from the other side. I don't know if they expected me to levitate or continue our game of chicken, or what, so I quickly manuevered through them to keep from being Wal-Mart sock aisle roadkill.

While I'm on that subject, since when did everybody think it's okay to use those motorized scooters? It used to be that you would only see people with major ailments, like a broken leg or foot injury, or an elderly person using them. Now it seems like some of the people I see on them are just lazy. They drive to the chip aisle and then hop off and walk with no difficulty over to the Cheetos and Fritos, then hop back on. It seems to me that the door greeter should screen these people like the government does for disability to determine whether or not they are eligible to use the motorized scooter.

So, here I sit with my box of kleenex (second one in 24 hours), my antibiotics for the sinus/ear infections, and my decongestant. Do y'all know how under-rated breathing really is?