~it did~

     A week has now passed since I started getting sick from strep throat.  Thankfully today I feel like I'm about 90% back.  I wasn't alone in my suffering, that's for sure.  Whatever the strain is this year, it is quite easy to catch and not so easy to get over.  Praise God for days of feeling better!

     A person doesn't always think about good health until they end up getting sick.  

     I have felt so bad for the children at school that have fallen ill to this in the course of the past two weeks.  One by one, it seems to have hit them.  They are so little and it hurts to see them get sick but the truth is, being sick from time to time is a part of life.  At best, all we can do is get some type of medicine in them, push the fluids, and send them to their snug warm beds for lots and lots of sleep.  Sounds like wise medical advice for any of us that come down with illness.

     For some reason, I thought about the days of being a kid and sick as I was lying in bed on Monday of this past week.  My 60-year old brain has dimmed a bit in the remembrances of the days of my youth, but one thing I have never forgotten are the times when I was really sick.  I came around before the days of immunizations for childhood diseases for things like measles, mumps, and chicken pox.  So when the first MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine was made available in 1971, I was already a high school sophomore who had long ago experienced those maladies of children.  My little sister and I caught the mumps together, closely followed behind by the chicken pox in the summer of 1960.  Although I was only a 5-year old, I have bits and pieces of that awful time stuck in my mind.  My mom filled me in on the missing parts of the memory later on in my life when I was a mother with 3 little children of my own, telling me how miserable that we two little girls felt.  I came down with the hard red measles on the very last day of school in third grade thus making the summer of 1964 a very unhappy one.  It wasn't fun but I managed.

     The absolutely worst disease ever to be had, whooping cough, was mine for the better part of the early spring of 1961.  There was only one way to remember and describe it.  Awful!  I can remember coughing like there would be no tomorrow, and I'm sure my parents might have felt that way for me from time to time.  I recollect my father coming over and picking me up and carrying me around, trying to soothe the cough in whatever way he could.  Once I remember them taking me out into the chilly evening air and for some reason, it really did help.  More than one trip was made to the doctor over it.  I don't know how my folks did it, because I wasn't the only one of their 7 who had been sick with it, but they did.  When the last cough was "whooped", I am sure that they breathed a sigh of relief.  I know I did!

      Today begins another new day and since I'm really behind from being sick so long, there's a lot of catch up work to do with school and here at home as well.  Our house is about 75% in order from the move a couple of weeks back and a thick stack of papers needs to be graded.  One way or another, I'll get to them both.  But I'm also remembering how important it is to take care of myself too and so I'm for sure going to be scheduling some time for myself in the form of a nap later on this afternoon.  When the ER doctor told me last week that this stuff could last for a week, I thought he was stretching it a bit.  Nothing could take that long.

     Come to find out, the good doc was right.
     It did.

I have no idea how they did it when all 7 of us were sick at once.  We didn't run to the doctor unless it was an absolute necessity.  Mom would simply grease us all up with Vicks and send us to our beds.  Each of us survived childhood by God's grace and our parents' undying love.