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Battle of the Bug
A Parent's Story of Triumph Over the Stomach Flu By Angela Harris
By the time my oldest was 3 and my youngest 4 months, I felt confident about my duties as a mother. All the apprehension and fear I felt following the births of my two sons had vanished, leaving behind a sense of calm – and cockiness.
I'd given birth to two healthy baby boys, both weighing more than 9 pounds, braved colds and colic, ear infections, middle-of-the-night feedings, scrapes, scratches and bruises of all variations, temper tantrums, projectile spit-up, leaky diapers and explosive bowel movements. I had successfully navigated through grocery store cereal aisles and the Wal-Mart toy department with two small children in tow, emerging unscathed. I had suffered through the agony of watching my boys get their immunizations, feeling daggers through my heart as soon as the needle touched their petal-soft baby skin.
But nothing could have prepared me for the disaster of full-blown, family-wide gastroenteritis, in other words the common stomach flu or "bug," according to my mother. And this "bug" was about to launch a full-blown invasion of my household. I'd dealt with upper respiratory infections and fevers, but this would make even the worst of them seem like mere sniffles.
The night it began, my children were sleeping like angels – my youngest upstairs in his crib and his brother on the couch. My husband and I were diving into a giant bowl of buttered popcorn, watching Everybody Loves Raymond. Evan cried out in his sleep, his little face scrunched up in a grimace. He'd had a nightmare, no big deal.
Our diagnosis was incorrect. Suddenly from our precious toddler spewed a substance akin to what came out of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. We leapt off the couch to take action and suddenly froze, unsure of what to do fi