[ back ]
Typhoid Tracy
(by Tracy Beckerman - March 12, 2008)
After eating my way through four
Orlando theme parks in five days, I knew I had put on some serious vacation poundage. By the time we got to Seaworld, I felt like Shamu was family. Clearly, I had to do something drastic to deal with the weight gain when I got home.
So I came down with the flu.
Certainly, this was not what I’d had in mind. I thought maybe some diet and exercise would be the more obvious way to go. But unfortunately, in addition to more junk food than you could shake Tinker Bell’s wand at, the parks were overrun with more little runny-nosed, virus-carrying children than an open audition for a Pediacare commercial. We were smack in the center of the germ universe.
I didn’t stand a chance.
For the first couple of days, I kept my feet firmly planted in the state of denial.
“It’s just a cold,” I told my husband. “I’ll be fine by the weekend.”
But on day three, when my head spun around and I levitated above the bed, I suspected I might be sicker than I thought.
“I’m going to go out and get you some medicine,” my husband said sympathetically. “What are your symptoms?”
“Um, I feel like I got hit by a truck.”
“I don’t think I’ll find that on the side of a Robitussin bottle,” he said. “Can you be more specific?”
“I feel like I got sideswiped by a 14-wheeler and then dragged two miles under the wheels of the truck and then thrown over the edge of a cliff,” I clarified.
“OK, that helps.”
He brought me a medicine for coughs and stuffy noses with fever, another for sore throats and headaches, and one more for sinus pressure and pain. He bought me two different kinds of lozenges, several homeopathic remedies, and a case of tissues. There was enough medicine to treat an army of flu-infected elephants. But I surveyed the pharmaceutical array before me and shook my head.
“You bought the wrong stuff.”
“How could I possibly buy the wrong stuff,” he questioned. “I bought everything they had.”
“No. What I needed was a two by four so you could hit me over the head and knock me out for a week until this over.”
For six days I sniffled and snorted and stayed in the same gross pair of pajamas until they threatened to walk off on their own and go on jammie strike.
Finally, on the seventh day I emerged from my house, pale and weak, squinting in the sun like a prisoner just released from solitary confinement.
But before I could even make it to my car door, my cell phone rang.
It was the school nurse.
I took the call and then hung up and called my husband.
“The school just called. Our daughter has 103 fever. She’s got the flu.”
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry,” he said. “Looks like you’re back in the house for another week.”
“That’s OK,” I said calmly. “There’s a bright side.”
“What?”
“I lost five pounds.”
Tracy Beckerman will sign her new book, “Rebel without a Minivan” Saturday, March 29, 2 p.m., at Borders Books at the
Garden
State
Plaza ,
Paramus .
[ back ]
