Of Nasty Colds and Spring Storms

This last Friday, Great Falls and the surrounding towns woke up to a freak spring storm. I guess I can't really say it was a "freak" storm, because this happens essentially every year to some degree, and every year we forget it happened and act all surprised when another one hits. Or some of us do, anyway...coughmecough...one could call it flat-out denial, I suppose. We became aware of the storm a little earlier than I would have liked when Tanner got a call from work at about five o'clock. When he looked out the window and announced that there was snow blowing sideways outside, I realized that I'd arisen a little too early from hibernation and decided to go back to bed for a couple weeks...until Brandt woke up an hour later, followed closely by Wade. The best laid plans...

The original call was supposed to be a quickie, and Tanner was excited because he got called at the right time to get the second half of the day off when that job was done. Ironically, he didn't get home until 2:30 the next morning, and then it was up again at 5:30 to make it back to work by 6 to start it all over again. As it turns out, the snow that was being blown sideways was just exactly the right consistency to do a ton of damage to the power lines; soft enough to stick, cold enough to freeze, and roughly three hundred times heavier than the dry, powdery snow that frequents these parts between October and March.Within a matter of hours, lines that were originally half an inch in diameter were closer to two inches across.

Forty mph winds had them "galloping". Much like when you take the end of a jump rope and shake it up and down, the resulting waves of wire would jump six or twelve or more inches at a time as they ran down the spans, tearing off arms and snapping off poles like toothpicks. Within the area that got hit by the storm, havoc was wreaked on essentially every stretch of wire that ran east to west. Someone in a helicopter measured one span of eight and a half miles of wire sitting on the ground. The actual number of poles that needed to be replaced and total mileage of downed wire was anybody's guess. Even after calling in fifteen or twenty extra crews from the surrounding towns, the linemen had a lot of work ahead of them. Tanner called me later that morning to say that I wouldn't be seeing much of him for the rest of the weekend and probably into the following week.

So I settled in for a boring, but decently relaxing week or so without a husband. Not my favorite thing to do, but it was necessary, and not exactly strenuous. Turns out, however, that even though I tend to lean toward the introverted side of the spectrum, I seem to crave human (i.e. adult) company when I'm left alone with two children for days on end. So Saturday morning, I pestered Stephanie into coming up for the weekend (bribing her with gas money was apparently effective). She helped me out of my absent-husband-induced funk, and kept me company as I whipped up five batches of cookies for the guys out working...I needed something to do!

Then that night, the slight sore throat I had woken up with turned into a raging cold. The next morning my whole face hurt. Stuffed up sinuses are the pits. I heaved a mental sigh when I realized that I still had to send Steph back to Bozeman...something about work and paychecks or something. Taking care of kids while I had a cold didn't sound like fun, but it was doable, and so I onward went.

Monday morning, Wade had it. He slept fitfully all night because his nose suddenly clogged up, and when he woke up the next morning, he was flushed and had a minor fever to go along with it. He didn't want to do anything but cuddle, alternated with bouts of throwing himself down on the floor to cry when I dared think of doing anything else. Sorry, kiddo, but sometimes Brother needs fed too, and nature doesn't always call when it's convenient! I was so glad that Brandt had escaped it, though. Juggling a sick toddler and a healthy baby was a challenge, but it was still easier than a sick mother attempting to care for two sick kids. Illness often turns even the sweetest children into high-maintenance little beasties, so kids like Wade that have a hefty dose of their mother's attributes (including but not limited to: impatience and a temper, topped off with a large pinch of stubborn) get downright difficult when they don't feel good.

My relief lasted about a day, until Brandt woke up Tuesday morning with a runny nose. Crud. We had been warned from the day we left the hospital that even a simple cold could put him back in the ICU, and that thought made itself right at home in the back of my mind, niggling away uncomfortably. At this point, Tanner wasn't even spending nights at home. Instead they were "shopping" out of Conrad, which essentially means that they were staying in hotels and using that as their home base while they worked. So as I listened to Brandt fight to breathe as he slept, my mind was racing around in circles, trying to figure out how exactly I was going to handle two kids in the ER in the middle of the night on my own, let alone how I would make it work if/when we got admitted to the hospital.

But everything seems scarier at night, it would seem. I was up nearly every hour with Brandt, using a Nose Frieda to clean him out as best as I could, trying to figure out what oils I could diffuse to replace the ones I was out of, and each time I wondered if this would be the time that he was bad enough that I'd need to take him in. Finally, as the sun started rising, his breathing cleared up enough for us both to get a couple consecutive hours of sleep, and I was able to relax a little, knowing that if he followed the same pattern as Wade and I had, then we were past the worst.

Needless to say, this morning I was very grateful for the miracle that are energy shots. Four broken hours of sleep do not a happy housekeeper make, unless there are large quantities of caffeine available for immediate consumption.

After a rough almost-week, we're finally hitting an even keel again. My cold is nearly gone, and Wade is creeping up on the tail end of his, so even though I still get to manage two sick kids alone, the challenge has diminished considerably. We're also able to see the light at the end of the tunnel, because it looks like Tanner will be able to come back home this weekend. It isn't set in stone, but it's possible enough to have me "flying up on the wings of anticipation". (Name the book that quote came from and we can be friends forever.) We will only have to hope that this particular flight isn't completed with a ground-shaking thud. At any rate, he can't work forever, so even if he doesn't come home Saturday, he'll be back eventually, and in the meantime, I can practice acting out the definition of enduring, even though I think I'm pretty well versed in it at this point.