It was just a little tickling in the back of my throat while I slept, a little dryness that wouldn't go away. Unperturbed, I drifted back to sleep under a skylight framing the Northwest sky fringed by towering conifers of the San Juan Islands. I was on vacation, and not going to let a little tickle worry me.
In the morning the skylight ushered in daylight filtered by high clouds; I pulled the sheet over my head and ignored it as long as I could before the sounds of stirring from the rest of our cabin convinced me to rouse. The tickle was still there, and funny thing: my husband had a bit of a sore throat too. Daughter wandered in eventually, saying, "Mom, I think I'm getting sick," with a hint of bemusement rather than the pathos of the truly miserable. She couldn't be all that bad.
We must have picked up a bug on the plane, but hey, we were here with friends and not going to let a little cold get in the way of our fun.
Hah.
Within a matter of hours Daughter was huddled on the couch under a blanket staring into space with a berm of tissues piling around her, too sick to read, eat, or even swallow. And for the next three days we passed the worst of the symptoms around us like a hot potato, only two of the six in our party escaping unscathed.
The parameters of our outdoorsy vacation rapidly shrank from the kayaking, biking and hiking excursions we had envisioned to the kinds of days when a hot shower is an event in itself, requiring a good rest afterwards, instead of a hasty precursor to another activity.
"What are ya gonna do?" It became my mantra for the duration, because really, there was nothing to be done. We were disappointed, yes, but at least we were with friends (only one of whom caught our illness, in a mercifully abbreviated form) and in a gorgeous location.
Instead of testing our mettle on bike paths or open water, those who felt healthy enough took mild walks down to the nearby tidepools and experienced a kind of rural enjoyment in "going into town," a 20-minute drive to the other end of the island, for supplies.
We swapped Sick On Vacation stories. I told of when my family was trailer camping when I was a young child and I woke up delirious with a spiking fever in the middle of the night. My dad searched for a pay phone and then navigated us to the Winston-Salem emergency room on a Saturday night while Mom undoubtedly said the prayers of a worried parent over me in the car while keeping my older sister calm. Our friends told of both of them waking up with food poisoning in the middle of the night on their first tent-camping experience with their infant daughter. Good times.
So we didn't have the vacation we had planned, but we went with the flow. After all, what are ya gonna do?
Photo of head-cold sufferer courtesy Toastwife on flickr. Some rights reserved.
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