Norovirus is most commonly known as the driving pestilence among cruise ships. What people don't seem to know is that it is also practically epidemic in nursing homes. What people also don't know is that for someone with a compromised immune system, it takes the body nearly two weeks to shed norovirus from their bowel. Whee. For everyone else, it's two to three days.
Now I have norovirus and I'm holed up in my home, missing at least 3 days of work (more than $1000, probably more, will be gone from my paycheck, just like that, as I work per diem) and I'm frickin' miserable.
Most people think of me as the positive attitude MSer, but when I get sick because of something like norovirus, I get exceedingly cranky. Why wouldn't I be? I am already taking DMDs which give me gastrointestinal distress to some degree. Now I have heaped on top of that a ridiculously spastic colon. Plus the cilia lining my intestine are burning up. Plus my digestive system from the top of my stomach to my rectum aches like a sumbitch (like one big tender bruise). Plus I have no appetite. Plus I have a sour metallic taste in my mouth. And you should hear the way liquids rush through my pipes, like a noisy water slide, ending with me burping up something that smells like rotten eggs. What this all means is that I will be spending the next couple of days chasing bouts of explosive diarrhea with Gatorade and decaffeinated tea.
Oh sure, I could be glib and say that was the easiest 5-10 pounds I ever lost overnight, but that doesn't make me feel any better about the realities.
How does norovirus happen in nursing homes? Elderly people have incontinence issues and they don't necessarily wash their hands. Food service workers in nursing homes come to work with viruses they may or may not even know they have, and they don't necessarily wash their hands. Healthcare workers come to work with viruses they may or may not even know they have, and they don't necessarily wash their hands.
Why don't all you people frickin' wash your hands???????? Ack. This is why I'm pissed off. Because if you all just washed your frickin' hands and stayed out of the public sphere while you were sick, I wouldn't be bedridden right now.
I must say, I am a compulsive handwasher. My job in the medical field requires it of me, as does having MS. I can't afford to contract diseases like norovirus. My wallet can't and my brain can't. As soon as I got home from my trip Sunday night, with a burgeoning case of norovirus already making its presence known by all the side trips made to roadside gas station johns, what did I do? I washed my hands and put on gloves. My whole family has already suffered through this misery once, I don't want to repeat that particular example of living hell.
Unfortunately, compulsive handwashing is not the reality for many healthcare workers, which is why it's a repetitive message posted in clinic and hospital washrooms, from November through April especially: WASH YOUR HANDS! But people forget to think, because they don't feel poorly. Or they imagine they aren't at risk for infecting anybody else.
Well, guess what?
You can carry norovirus and never have symptoms. Lurve-ly.
Now my parasthesias are back after months of being gone. Not good. That means my brain is having a problem fighting off attacks from viral proteins even as I write this. More work for my DMDs to do to get me back on what I thought was a forward movement toward some healing.
I could get into a whole thing about health literacy right now, how only 12% of our entire population (including ALMOST ALL OF you smart educated people) don't know sh&t about your own healthcare world, but I'll save that for when I have a more positive frame of mind.
I could also get into a discussion about the latest trend, in which some people gleefully point out that we don't need doctors, we just need water, exercise, fruits and vegetables and fresh air. Really? Really? So this MS I have, and now its concurrent noroviral companion, which is right now shredding the myelin sheathing off of my axons and eating holes into my gray and white matter... these are all my fault because I haven't just treated myself with water, exercise, fruits and vegetables and fresh air? Really?
No, I'm sick right now because a/Who Knows Why? MS has environmental and genetic components, but that is all they can really say about its cause, and b/I visited the nursing home of my MIL which, unbeknownst to me, is crawling with norovirus.
NOT MY FAULT.
That's all I can write for now... I'm too pissed off.
