4-9-09

A house of pink-eyed Pinkeys, Wal-Mart and daycare provide family fun

I joke around with my wife about the fact that she brings home all kinds of germs from teaching all of her elementary school kids. I like to call them a bunch of germ-carrying window lickers.
I owe this in part to the fact that one of my memories of elementary school consists of kids riding the school bus with their heads resting on the glass of the windows and their tongues slowly cleaning the grime off of the bottom pane of glass.
Window Licker.
Now that I have children of my own and can actually watch my daughter rest her head on the front window of our den and run her tongue across the glass, I have the authority to use the said title.
I am digressing a bit.
About a week ago, my daughter came home from day care not only with a bag of soiled clothing and empty sippy cups, she came home covered in an invisible layer of pink eye covering her cute little outfit, hands and face.
We have had numerous run-ins with pink eye. It seems like every time we come home from Wal-Mart, one of our kids wakes up the next morning with crusty red eyes.
I truly think that Wal-Mart is just a 30,000 square foot petri dish. If you want to catch something that will put you out of commission for a few days, take a quick stroll down the toy aisle with your hand out, gently brushing against a few colorful boxed items as you walk. If you want to make sure you walk out of there with something extra, just touch a few shopping carts and door handles.
Throughout all of the cases, I have never come down with it. I don’t think that I have had pink eye since I was a child. Leigh gets mad because she thinks I have some sort of immunity to the infection.
Not this time.
Wednesday morning at about three a.m., I woke to Nash crying and my eyes were crusted shut.
Son of a ....gun!
I finally got it.
When we all got up at six thirty, I told Leigh, “I got it. My eyes are slam shut.”
“It’s about time, but I’m sorry,” she said with a little bit of reassurance because now she knew she wasn’t crazy.
As soon as the doctor’s office opened, I made an appointment. I got my eye drops from our family pharmacy
By the end of the day, both eyes were red and burning. Leigh, who has lots of experience with getting the infection, stepped back when I walked into the house from being at work all day.
“Whoa, you got it bad. You caught up for never getting it in the past. DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!”
It has now been a solid week. I have had this annoying infection for seven days. I have avoided the public and coworkers as much as possible and have been washing my hands about every ten minutes.
Everyone in the house came down with the infection throughout the course of the week. Everyone’s hands are as dry and cracked as can be from washing and the house smells of bleach thanks to a germ-a-phobic wife.
Leigh had the bathtub filled with bleach water and all of the children’s toys that could handle drowning in the toxic bath. At first glance, I thought a Toys-R-Us tanker ship had been T-boned by a torpedo in the kids’ bathtub.
I think that we have officially eradicated the Wal-Mart /daycare / window licking infection from our house. It was just in time, too. I saw a C.D.C. truck driving by our house a few days ago. Our house is no longer a petri dish and my hands can start to mend.
I think that the next time we go to Wal-Mart, I will disburse rubber gloves and some respirators that I have stored down in my shop. I might even consider installing a contamination bath for the kids to walk through when they get home from daycare.
If I don’t get that infection for another thirty years, it will still be too soon.
Bryan Pinkey can be found coating his hands in Neosporin or at bpinkey@nccox.com.