Week? Gone.

It has not been the best of weeks. It really started with Bear coming home from school last Friday with a fever, and spending the weekend disguised as a little grey lump on the couch. Monday night, I succumbed in grand style. And Wednesday, Bug was sent home from school with a fever. Whee!

This is the first time I've been on my computer since Sunday. Usually my slavish devotion to weather.com alone is enough to have me logging online two, three times a day. This week I was unaware of what day of the week it even was, let alone that there was weather happening outside my window.

Two words: Stomach flu.

Puking, fever, chills, stomach pain ... all the standard cast of characters. And let me tell you, my inner hypochondriac had a fricking field day. Although I'd like to go on record here by saying that while I play along with the whole "hypochondriac" label, I prefer to think of myself as "medically well-informed."

So Monday night, I'm laying in bed with horrible upper-right abdominal pain and a fever, and I'm forcing Tom to look up the location of both the spleen and the gall bladder in our medical book. True story. I'm groaning and clutching my stomach, trying to decide whether I need to throw up or do a C-section for the alien trying to emerge from my abdomen, and he's reading me all the encouraging bits he can find about things like "ruptured peptic ulcer", "pancreatitis", and I'm roaring, "I don't care about that. Find out where my goddamned spleen is!"

At some point, in between the groaning and the clutching, I also found strength to tell him the plot of the latest Grey's Anatomy where the woman was having a major heart attack which presented solely as a stomach ache and vomiting. And she died.

It was quite a party. Then I threw up. The end.

The spleen's on the left, by the way. And I'd like a bit of credit for not diagnosing myself with appendicitis, which is usually my go-to for any form of stomach disturbance. A true hypochondriac would never have been that discerning. I'm more like an amateur doctor, but instead of going to med school I just watch a lot of House, Grey's Anatomy, and own a copies of both The Physician's Desk Reference and The Mayo Clinic Family Health Book. You can learn about many, many alarming things that can kill you from these sources. Tip: skip the pages that illustrate skin diseases if you ever want to sleep again.

On the upside, I've basically been eating ice chips and Jell-O for four days now, and that's gotta be good for at least a pound a day, right? Because otherwise, all I've gotten out of this week of puking, aches, chills, and night sweats is a lesson on spleen geography. And if that's true, I'd like my week back, please.