Jan 5, 2015 3 min read

We may have finally ridded our home of the plague. Whether it was a cold or the flu I’m not sure, but it was a difficult battle to fight. My kids never got sick, and the worst I had was a stuffy nose and a fever blister on my lip, but my poor husband went down hard. (Trust me, he is the true battle.)

When he and I first got married, he got sick all of the time. He was certain our oldest daughter was a disease carrier; she delighted in bringing home all sorts of germs and malaise from her chums at school. It is a wonder we stayed married, because I am an awful caregiver, he is a wretched patient, and he was sick every 10 minutes for the first two years. I swear, he had no immune system, and his circuits were simply overloaded.

After a few years, the frequency of his illnesses diminished, but not his demeanor when sick. He would swear we were purposely making a ton of noise, when in truth we were tiptoeing around and whispering. He would request food and then refuse to eat it because he just couldn’t stomach it. He would holler if I let him sleep through his chores, but shriek if I woke him when he had “just gotten to sleep.”

I started calling him Captain Happy.

For my part, I would avoid the bedroom where he slept. I knew that I could do nothing to make him feel better, that entering the room would make me feel worse, and that there was NO WAY I wanted what he was having. It’s not a perfect system, but it works for us.

Beginning on Christmas Eve this year, he complained about achy joints and a sore throat. Christmas morning, he managed to get up long enough to see the kids open their gifts, but shortly after breakfast had to go back to bed for a little while. He lay upstairs coughing and moaning for a while and didn’t even emerge for lunch.

For days, he functioned long enough to feed animals and keep the farm running, but little else. He said his throat was on fire, and eating didn’t sound appealing in any sense. He coughed at night and coughed all day. He grouched around when he was out of bed and was generally miserable. (And so were we.)

Finally, this past weekend, he started to feel a little better. Still exhausted, he was able to stay up longer than he slept. He hauled wood to the house and putted around outdoors for a while longer than he had in a week. He rejoined the rest of us at the dinner table. He was on the mend.

And none too soon, I might add. He says he felt like he was dying, and I say I felt like killing him.

It’s not a perfect system, but it works for us.

Laura Zoeller can be reached at zoeller5@verizon.net.