Whistle Belly Thumps
One after the other after the other – after.the.other … The people, both large and small, that reside in my home, clenched their buttocks with superhuman strength and ran in desperation for the latrine.
What began as one person with some loose stool for a single unremarkable day, somehow turned into a three-week multi-generational back-door trots EVENT.
It all began with my husband.
Isn’t it just like any respectable, god-fearing man to attempt to lead in every area of life, including and not limited to leading his family into several weeks of the green apple nasties.
Thanks, honey. I see you.
Because we are unnaturally and preposterously proud of being tough and “gutting it out”, we sought no help for our malaise. I was the second to fall prey to the whistle belly thumps. Several days after I joined my husband in extraordinary-toilet-time, our children began to fall, one by one.
Two weeks passed, toilet paper consumption increased, as grocery consumption decreased in direct correlation. Troy dropped ten pounds.
We focused on the positive. Perhaps I will write the donors and let them know we have cut our food bill in half, they will be thrilled with our frugality, I thought. (joke!)
As the days ticked by I heard from the kids that underwear had been thrown away a time or two. I heard from my husband that he hadn’t made it to the toilet on one particularly difficult day. Well – that will off-set the grocery savings, you guys!
One morning more than two weeks into the event, I received a voice message from the co-chief in charge as I drove the winding roads of rural Haiti. He said, “You know what? I’m still really sick. I tried some Cipro and it did not work and I’m kind of afraid now. Why do we still have this terrible diarrhea?”
I listened as I drove and I thought, “Oh, so we are not gonna tough it out, huh? Dude is afraid. Alright then, Momma is going gang-busters. Time to act.”
I called immediately on my favorite physician in the great North. While her specialty is pediatric emergency, she has more than dabbled in tropical health and disease. Her instructions were clear. Do not mess around. Treat for Giardia, Typhoid, and a few other sporidium just for kicks. Nail it from every angle.
Because we are nothing if not capricious, earlier this week we deployed every single weapon known to mankind, the opposite of “tough it out.”
Ten years of sketchy hygiene practices finally caught up with us.
Don’t get me wrong, we wash our hands and try to tell our kids to do the same before eating and after touching a goat or a donkey or the local currency. You know how it is though, kids will be kids and I guarantee you the youngest one carries a chicken around by its keister and then eats a peanut butter sandwich on the regular.
That said, most of us probably wash our hands nearly as much as the next guy, but maybe not our lettuce, our tomatoes, or our cucumbers. I have never fully bought into careful disinfection of vegetables. And now, I must repent.
Because we had never paid the price for ignoring the bleach and vinegar when it came time to wash locally grown veggies, time was simply no longer on our side. A decade of unwashed veggies finally resulted in the gargantuan Giardia outbreak of our time.
By this point, you are probably thinking, well this is TMI. Why the oversharing?
I will tell you why.
This is an essay where I need to reject my spurious nature. I NEED to confess as I tie my refusal to be proactive in my vegetable washing, to my refusal to seek medical help in a timely manner, to my frequent refusal to seek God until I am quite literally more than desperate for His help.
There is a pattern here. A pattern that needs confession and change. Read this as my public repentance of the aforementioned everything.
As I type the final sentences of this entry, everyone in my household is taking chalky, terrible tasting medicine three times a day. Everyone ate dinner last night, a welcome change from the previous nights. We believe that big change and parasite-free days are on the horizon!
Like many of us that live far away from our mothers, I did not tell my mother how sick everyone was until we had a pretty trustworthy solution in place. There is just no point in stressing out your Mom. Am I right?Her response was predictable. “Move to Texas, please,” she texted.
Oh, Mom. Please wash your vegetables! We had all the fun destroying her erroneous belief that Texas is a parasite-free Republic. Moms. You probably know one. They just want their babies safe (or just not filled with parasites) and nearby. I cannot even blame her. (Although, I can -and just did- tease her.)
Perhaps, like me, your years of service abroad have led you to places of pride and ignorance. If so, feel free to share your favorite story of bodily fluid loss along with your favorite method of getting your veggies clean.
