Every Day Is Like Sunday

Well, OK, not every day is like Sunday, but today certainly is. I have been thinking about this last week and I thought it might be fun to write about what happened following Asher's recovery from RSV. If you read that post then you know that right after Asher began to feel better, and I mean within hours of his breathing returning mostly to normal, I had to go to Dallas for a national meeting for the company I work for. Not a great situation, but I really had to go.

So, my district, which has the uplifting and inspiring name of Skeleton Key, got the blessing of forgoing a standard meeting room or conference room and instead holding our portion of the meeting in a hotel room. Yes, that's right, a hotel room. Fourteen cranky salespeople and our national visitors crammed into a single hotel room. Now, the hotel staff did replace the bed with a conference table, but the whole point is that things were a bit cramped for the four days we were meeting. Add to the previous the fact that two of our numbers were coughing like they were paid to act as if they had Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, another got a stomach flu easier to catch than a pop fly, and a third came down with pink eye and had to be quarantined to her room for twenty-four hours, and you start to get an idea of the pleasant and motivating nature of our meeting. Recently one of our district members sent a voicemail comparing our meeting room to a petri dish. He even mentioned the fact that many of the members of some of the northeast districts (Boston, New York, etc.) had contracted our contagion.

By the end of the week I began to suspect that every object on our confernce table, every handout passed to us, and every writing implement was an infected fomite. I developed an acute obsession with handwashing and insisted that I not drink or eat anything anyone else in my district had touched.

Alas, my efforts were to no avail. As soon as I got home my eye began to itch like I'd rolled it in fiberglass insulation, my throat began to burn, and my chest congested near the point of respiratory distress. I immediately began a regimen of occular antibiotics, esther C, Airborne, Zicam, NyQuil, Tylenol, and Ibuprofen. My cold lasted only a week and I never once awoke with my eye glued shut by that nasty custard-like discharge associated with conjunctivitis.