What I did on my winter vacation…

It’s been a little quiet around here because for the last two weeks of January I was on vacation in sunny Puerto Vallarta. Andrea and I calculated that it had been many, many years since we had taken a vacation that didn’t involve: a) family, and b) lots of sightseeing, so we decided to take a nice long vacation somewhere sunny where we had nothing to do. The trip itself went great and we had a wonderful time — lots of time to lounge about by the pool or on the beach, enjoying the wonderful Mexican sun. (As a side note, if anyone’s looking to buy/rent condos down in Puerto Vallarta, I highly recommend the company we used, Bayside Properties. They were fantastic.) However, once the vacation was over, things didn’t go so well…

It all started on the way to the airport for our flight home. Andrea’s stomach had been bothering her all morning and about 5 minutes from the airport, she suddenly says “We’ve got to stop the cab, now!” So we pull over and she jumps out of the cab and throws up on the side of the road. She feels a little better, so we continue on to the airport (and tip the cabbie really well). As we get to the front of the ticket line, Andrea says again, “I’m not feeling so good,” so they wheel over a wheelchair and she sits down while I check in. Just as I’m getting the tickets handed to me (and this turns out to be fortuitous in a minute), she starts violently retching again. Thankfully, a very nice old lady in line with us has handed her a plastic bag, so we avoid a nasty scene. The airport people call in their doctor, who wheels her over to their temporary clinic (since the airport is apparently remodeling), where she throws up some more. The doctor gives her an anti-emitic injection and suggests that she be taken to the hospital. Really wanting to be sick in her own house rather than in a Puerto Vallarta hospital, she insists on getting on the plane, so back we go. The Alaska folks are wary about letting her on the plane, but since we’ve already got tickets in hand and checked luggage, they let us on.

The anti-emitic starts wearing off about two hours in to the five hour flight and Andrea starts feeling sick again. She makes it to about three hours before starting retching violently again. By the time we land, she’s a real mess and so we have medics meet us at the gate and Andrea gets taken directly off the plane and to a waiting ambulance. (Let me say, it’s the fastest that I’ve ever made it through customs and immigration… the homeland security guy came directly on the plane and let us through on our way to the ambulance!) Off we go to the emergency room and arrive at about 8pm. At about 3am, they’ve determined that she’s still too sick to go home and admit her overnight. I go home, feed the cats, grab some clothes, cancel a few appointmenst and head back. By the next afternoon, she’s feeling much better and is able to go home.

And, of course, the kicker is that somewhere in dealing with all the bodily fluids (not to put too fine a point on it), Andrea managed to transfer the bug to me. So just as she starts to return to some semblence of health, I get knocked out of commission with some serious trouble with the other end of the digestive tract. Assuming nothing new happens, we’re hoping that maybe by next week things will get back to normal. But I’m not holding my breath…

11 thoughts on “What I did on my winter vacation…

  1. paulvick

    Well, as P.J. O’Rourke says "There is no way to make vomiting courteous. You have to do the next best thing, which is to vomit in such a way that the story you tell about it later will be amusing."

    OK, well, maybe it’s not amusing. But what good is a blog if you can’t tell vomit stories?

    Reply
    1. paulvick

      Karl: After talking with the docs, I actually kind of doubt it… I’m not going to go into details, but unless you were me and directly caring for her, you were pretty safe…

      Reply
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