No statute of limitations on eating crow
I'm not sure if you've heard the news. According to a recent study by Johns Hopkins University, "man flu" may be a real thing.
That news is making every wife out there roll her eyes so hard.
Unfortunately, in our house, it means that I just have to eat another round of crow.
Almost exactly one month after we got married, the WH (Wonderful Husband) came home from work with a headache and was complaining of not feeling well. For the most part, I just shuttled him off to bed and went about my business. A day or two passed, and he was not getting any better. I suggested that perhaps he was spending a little too much time in bed, and maybe he needed to get out and get some exercise.
I tend to take a "suck up and deal" attitude when it comes to illness. Take some Tylenol and move on, something that my kids and my husband do not appreciate when applied to them, but are more than happy to take advantage of when I am the one under the weather.
Anyway, back to the crow. At this point, I realized that he was running a fever, and perhaps maybe it was a little bit worse than it seemed. (There was also a little incident involving him staying hydrated with red Hawaiian Punch and then there was copious amounts of vomiting, and now, I'm celebrating my tenth year Hawaiian Punch free.)
The fact that he willingly went to the doctor should have clued me in that something was really wrong, but I was still a relatively naive, young housewife. He had most of the symptoms of pneumonia and he had some blood work and chest X-rays taken, and was sent home on broad-spectrum antibiotics.
Not long after his first dose, he started to break out in spots. My first guess was that he was allergic to the drugs and I convinced him to scarf down some Benadryl while I got the doctor on the phone. The doctor agreed that this was probably some sort of allergy and we would wait for the rest of the tests to come back to see what we were really dealing with before we tried more antibiotics.
In the meantime, his symptoms continued to worsen and as his fever climbed higher and higher, we got more and more nervous. Well, I did anyway. WH was starting to go in and out of consciousness. I finally accepted that maybe this wasn't quite some run-of-the-mill 48-hour bug that we were dealing with and we went to the hospital, where he was admitted and ended up in the ICU in quarantine.
Are you familiar with Dr. House? The Fox television series about the doctor who is a medical detective? I now know for a fact that these types of doctors do exist. No one had any idea what was causing the WH's symptoms and they were only getting worse. Also, let me tell you, this doctor had about half the bedside manner of Greg House. Every few minutes he would come in and order another round of blood work, a spinal tap, X-rays, CT scans, you name it.
I got the feeling that it had been a while since he got to practice on a real mystery patient.
Long story short, eventually, they determined that the WH was suffering from Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Yep. An extremely rare tick-borne disease that responded almost immediately to the right antibiotic. He was one of about 110 cases reported in the United States that year. The best (or worst) part. … RMSF can be fatal if left untreated, which thanks to my "suck up and deal" attitude toward illness, almost happened.
The good doctor actually told me that at one point, he really believed the WH was a goner. AND THE WH HAS NEVER LET ME FORGET IT. EVER.
Every single sniffle, cough, bellyache, and ingrown toenail has been accompanied by the now very familiar refrain, "Remember that time I almost died and you told me to take some Tylenol?"
Surely there has to be a statute of limitations on that, doesn't there? But now with "man flu" potentially becoming a real thing, I guess I'd better keep my fork handy.
Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.
