Friday, November 18, 2011

Germs

Tis the season to be....no, not jolly, paranoid!  Yep, that's right, I'm a freak about germs.  If someone is coughing, my daughter and I are walking the other way and if they are sneezing, forget about it.  Yes, it could just be allergies.  If that's the case, I'll apologize from across the room.  
 
Why am I a bit obsessive and freaky about germs?  It all boils down to immune systems.  Some people have great ones and some people just don't.  My daughter had a great immune system until about 4 years ago.  
 
If the average person gets the common cold, it sucks.  They feel like crap, they're tired, and they have some mucus issues.  My daughter doesn't get the common cold.  She gets a cold which 90% of the time ends up with her having bronchitis.   She has to do nebulizer treatments and a lot of the times, ends up on steroids.  We spend a lot of time with B and her family.  Her oldest daughter has a worse immune system than Kim.  If she gets sick, it's always nebs, sinus rinses, hoping she doesn't need steroids but knowing she probably will, and usually antibiotics.  It's every 2 hours day and night, doing a 20 minute nebulizer.  It's listening to her lungs and deciding if they are getting better or worse, and occasionally, it's the hospital.  Fortunately, Becca has been trained to deal with almost everything that needs to be done so the hospital is rarely necessary anymore.
 
So yeah, I'm paranoid.  We're paranoid.  We can't put them in a bubble and we have to let them live their lives.  We can't make them so afraid of germs that they won't walk out the door.  (Although sometimes I wish we could).  What we can do is make them aware, ask people who are sick to go away, and keep the massive germophobe inside from sanitizing every single surface that another human being touches.  
 
You would not believe the rude and nasty things people have said to me.  So before judging me and calling me an overprotective, anally retentive, obsessive-compulsive freak; look at it from my point of view.    Just look at it from over there if you're sick please!


1 comment:

  1. I love how you say :ask people who are sick to go away. I feel the same way. It boggles my mind when parents bring their clearly sicks kid to some sort of kid event! Annoying!

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