So you know that really really bad stomach thing my four year old had?  Well, we realized he caught it from the hotbed of germs known as the kids play area at the mall during the busiest shopping season of the year.  In the future we will have to consider exposing them to really shitty illness as a drawback to getting the kids out of the house and away from the TV.

Our son is doing much better now, thank god, and being his regular self again.  But guess who caught it from him?

*Raising hand slowly*

And not just me.  The rest of our little family, meaning my husband and my seven year old, were also not safe from its predatory ways.

This year’s strain of the stomach flu is not the stomach flu you are familiar with.  No, not at all.  This feels more like it should be called Ebola, Jr.  I kid you not.

It leaves you feeling hot and cold at the same time.  It sends its minions to gnaw on the inside of your abdomen.  The best way I can describe the feeling is hot little dull knives poking at your innards.  The pain was what kept us awake the most.  I don’t remember dealing with so much of it during past stomach issues.  It made my not so very religiously inclined seven year old ask if it was time to pray so that Allah could take away the hurt.

You don’t know whether to shit or to barf first, they’re both so overwhelmingly compelling.  There’s an eye of the storm moment after every mad dash to the bathroom, where you think okay, that was the last one, I feel much better, until around 30-45 minutes later, when you’re doing it all over again and you realize the effing remote’s crapped out (no pun intended) and the repeat button is stuck.

The one and only good point about mutant stomach bug, version 2014 is that it moves fast.  The little slut.  The three of us caught it late Wednesday afternoon, and by early Thursday morning, we were able to give the hallway bathroom a break and get some rest.  By Thursday afternoon, I was able to get up, walk around for a few minutes, and attempt to take care of my pretty much back to normal four year old.  Yay for primary caretakers!  Where being sick means you get to do all the stuff you normally do with the addition of being sick.

Protect yourself from this year’s strain of stomach flu as well as you can, internet peoples.  You don’t want to catch this thing, believe me.  Compared to it, the stomach bug you have dealt with in the past is the common household cockroach.  This, my friends, is Godzilla.

If you think you can handle hours of shitting out all your body fluids, caressing your garbage can like it was your breastfeeding newborn, and having your ass make love to the toilet seat, then go ahead and give it a call.  You’ll find its number scrawled on the walls of dirty public bathrooms everywhere.

Ha ha.  That’s a funny one.  Get it?  Walls?  Stomach bug?  Dirty bathrooms?

You suck. 😐

It is now Friday afternoon and we are all on our way back to normal.  Lingering side effects have been a constant state of mild nausea, a heightened sensitivity to smell, and an overall feeling of having a bad hangover.  My nose is telling me there’s an open jar of sewer water somewhere in our house, but my husband is saying just stop complaining, will you? and that I’m overreacting.  Okay, then.