For months, I planned these few weeks with my brother here, and then my mom too, then just my mom. We booked flights and hotels and cooking classes, plotted itineraries and scheduled our days. And then in mid December he showed up, and the wheels started rolling, everything falling into place. I'd spent so long planning it that as the days passed it all felt oddly surreal.
Then we came home from Koh Chang at 6pm, starving and ready for dinner. We thought some Korean barbeque might be nice, but chose a nice Chinese restaurant at the last minute for Matt's last dinner in Bangkok before flying home the next night. We ordered, among other things, their famous roast duck. And that's where the trouble started. The food seemed oddly lukewarm and the duck especially was not hot.
By the time I woke up at 6am the next day, I was the only one who had slept and my brother had already started puking. Mom wasn't far behind. For the next 5-6 hours I ran between them as they got worse and then laid down at the foot of my bed when I could, nauseated myself. By late morning I was really worried and starting contacting friends to help and had a colleague's wife (who is a nurse) stop by. As the dehydration got worse we got my doctor to come to the house to see them as they couldn't really go anywhere. She was a lifesaver. Without that we may have had to make an ER run.
I called Lufthansa to find out the options for changing Matt's flight and getting a medical certificate, called the airline Mom and I were going to fly to Chiang Mai the next day and cancelled the cooking class we had scheduled for that day.
By evening my nausea got much worse and I started getting sick. I had been praying all day that I would just stay healthy enough to take care of them and that I would be able to summon the strength to do so. I'll be honest. I had never cleaned up after sick people before, other than myself. Normally, if I had felt how I did, I would not have gotten out of bed. But somehow, when other people are counting on you, we find that place of super-strength, similar I am sure to the strength hidden inside of moms who take care of sick kids or keep the house going even when they are sick. Food poisoning taught me a lot about service.
Luckily by the time I was on the tile floor my mom was well enough to check on Matt from time to time and I was able to pop up in the better moments and help them. By night I was feeling okay and laid down on the couch to keep watch through the night. I crawled into bed at about 1:30 once Matt's fever had broken, I'd gotten some fluids in him, and everyone was sleeping as comfortably as possible.
Needless to say, Matt didn't make it home that night nor did we make it to Chiang Mai the next day. We didn't make it to Chiang Mai as it was going to be a short trip and by the time we could go it was only one night, plus, in order to change it I would have had to be on the phone with the airline in my worst moments to reschedule. But we've had some relaxing days here and then were able to head out to the ginormous Chatachuk market on Saturday, the Jim Thompson House, and the yesterday the Grand Palace.
The soonest Lufthansa could get Matt on a flight was the 9th, so he booked another flight home the night of the 4th. Except shortly after he left for the airport Mom looked at his itinerary and noticed a problem with the date: January 19th. So I ran off behind him to the airport, though by the time I got there and had him paged he had already exchanged more money and was working on getting himself to my apartment in a taxi (quite a feat- sometimes it's hard for me to get the drivers to go the right place even when I know exactly where to go and speak a bit of the language). Eventually my mom called me on the spare cell phone to tell me he was back and I returned home. So he's back to the flight on the 9th. We're make the best of the fact that he's stuck here with me awhile longer.
So it has not gone according to plan, these last 5 days, but God has sustained me in the moments of worry. When I've needed to serve, he's given me strength. When I've needed to sleep, I've slept. But I needed to hold my cookies, I've held them. And in the midst of it all we've had some laughs and been able to poke a bit of fun at ourselves. And we have quite a mind to walk back into that Chinese restaurant and give them the bill for what it cost us to eat at their restaurant!
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