Germs

This past Tuesday my husband came home from work in the afternoon. He has to be back to the church around 6:00 pm because he's teaching a webinar for CBMatrix. He teaches for roughly an hour, takes a break and then teaches for about another hour. When he got home, he wasn't feeling well. He took a nap. When he woke up, I was getting ready to head out the door to get the boys their flu vaccination. I kissed Troy and he WAS BURNING UP.

That fever, 101.5 when I shoved the thermometer into his ear a minute after feeling ALL the HEAT, did not break until yesterday. It was almost a full 48 hours of 101. It would dive, temporarily, down to a high 99 when he took Ibuprofen but then it would shoot back up again. He was miserable.

Yesterday, he woke up, still burning, and informed me that he was throwing in the towel. It was time to bring in the big guns. And by the big guns, I mean, a physician. I asked if he had any other symptoms and he said that his head hurt horribly.

"Does your throat hurt?" I asked. "Maybe it's strep."

"I've never had strep in my entire life," he reminded me. Just before I left to take the boys to school he took his temperature again. I asked him if his fever was down at all. "It's 100," he told me. Then he switched the thermometer to the other ear. "Wait. Maybe not. It's 105."

"A HUNDRED AND FIVE?!?!" I howled. Because I think my temperature was 104 or 105 when I was two years old and I can vividly remember all the terrible hallucinations I saw on that horrid night. And I was a child. I feel like 105 for an adult would be, maybe, mostly dead. I kid not, my mind had already thrown my kids in the car and used super human strength to lift my husband from the bed, stuck him in the car, thrown cold, wet towels on his head and floored it to the ER before he ever had the time to shake his head. "No. Sorry. 101 POINT 5."

Whew. That's, just, a lot better.

I insisted on driving him to the doctor because, in his feverish state, I didn't want him hallucinating an open lane where really there was a bus. The doctor asked him if his throat hurt. "Not really, Maybe just a little." He pointed a flashlight into Troy's throat and nearly recoiled.

"Oh. Okay. Wow. So your throat is really red and there's white pockets on your tonsils and I'm pretty sure it's strep."

So there's a first time for everything.

He took an antibiotic and he's on the mend. But, apparently, strep really doesn't agree with my husband because I have never seen him sicker than he was over these last few days. I wanted to love him and take care of him and will him to feel better all while simultaneously staying several feet away from him and his highly contagious germs.