The Fight, Day 4: Blackberry Vomit
/They look good now...
*Warning – This post is not for the faint of stomach.
Ben first stayed home from school after he threw up early Tuesday morning. He hadn’t thrown up since and I had slowly reintroduced foods (ice chips, toast, apples, eggs) and he’d kept them down fine. We appeared to be hanging out in the long, slow lane of low fever and horrible cough, so I was treating accordingly. I didn’t expect him to go to school today because the cough was still very bad, but I was really just waiting it out and praying the cough would end soon. Since he seemed fine otherwise last night we had shrimp tacos and quesadillas…and blackberries.
Around midnight, I heard Ben coughing which was frustrating but not unusual. It got worse and then I heard him talking. I got up and found him in the bathroom. His face was green.
“I threw up,” he said.
“Oh, baby.”
He coughed. “I think we need to put Vicks on my feet again.” He handed me a sock covered in vomit. It oozed down my arm.
“Okay. I think it’s on your pajamas. Let’s get them off.”
“Okay. I think we need to put Vicks on my feet again.” (We are known for our middle-of-the-night coherence.)
“It’s red! Oh my gosh, it’s red!” I started panicking that he was throwing up blood.
“What, my eye?”
“No, the vomit!”
“What’s vomit?”
“The throw up.”
“Yeah, I threw up.”
I got his pajamas off and went to his room to get new ones. It looked like a murder scene. Only maybe more hot pink and black. There were blackberry seeds everywhere that exploded into purple carpet stains when I tried to clean them up. Since he had gotten up to wash his hands, there was a pinkish-red path from his bed to the door (opposite corner of the room, of course). I almost took a picture of the whole mess, but didn’t think anyone would appreciate the incredible medical and digestive display as much as I did.
The barf bucket sat in pristine condition next to this whole scene.
I could not stop laughing as I tried to clean up the whole mess. I felt like I was in an animated movie. It just kept spreading and staining and sliding away from me. For better or worse, I decided to let it dry and try again in the morning. I have carpet cleaner on it now. Wish me luck!
I set him up in my room (again) with the barf bucket (again). We got to sleep fairly quickly (after the usual discussion of our feelings and plans for the next day) but Morning Person Ben was wide awake at 6 am with some of these gems:
“I have two stomachs and they are both hungry and thirsty. Since I have a food stomach and a drinking stomach, I can have water even though I just threw up. It’s fine.”
“How am I possibly going to get to sleep when my body is not in perfect shape?”
“My tongue feels funny. It’s like my tongue is taking over my mouth. You cannot really think I can go to sleep like this.”
I’m beginning to view sleep as a distant memory, an old friend that I miss and wonder, “What happened? Where did we go wrong?”
While cleaning the hot pink and black contents of my son’s stomach off his beige carpet, I really regretted the blackberries. I thought about signs I may have missed that he was sick. But really there were none.
Sometimes we think we’re good and we’re not good. Sometimes we really are good and then we throw up in the middle of the night. Sometimes we should know we are about to vomit but we have the self-awareness of a six year-old who says “Okay” when you ask how he feels on a scale of one to ten. And sometimes we know we’re about to blow but we just don’t want to admit it.
It's not easy, but it's really good to check in and be aware of yourself - to think about how you feel, how you treat people, what stains you're leaving behind you that are going to take some major work to clean up.