One man's sick is another woman's vacation

Over the last week I came down with a wicked bout of food poisoning. I will spare you the details other than to say that I was not aware of how many different colors could exist inside of me at once.

As I was expelling any and all non-essentials, I figured that Emily would be there to mop my brow and rub my back. But unfortunately she had other things to take care of--like swimming in a pool with friends. No joke. While I was slowly drowning in the tidal waves of nausea, Emily was creating her own waves--happy, splashy waves--at a friend's swimming pool. I really couldn't be that upset; just to think about swimming was enough to push me over the edge of the next nausea wave.

I've read enough books about marriage at this point to know that flexibility and the ability to be somewhat fluid with expectations is important, so I put the whole brow-mopping thing out of mind and knew I would have to gut this one through partially on my own. Emily got home from her day of poolside fun and sat with me in our room for a bit. I stopped being nauseous for about two minutes which let me fall asleep.

I woke up to the thundering sound of horse hooves. It seems that Emily's day in the sun was not enough excitement, and I'm really boring when sick, so she decided to watch a movie on Netflix. No, not some quiet romantic comedy or foreign kid movie--a movie chock full of cheering, dramatic orchestra swelling, and a whole lot of horse hooves. Secretariat. And to top it off, the stereo our TV is hooked up to is a bit picky when it comes to volume, and Emily hasn't necessarily gotten a handle on it yet, so the movie was playing full blast.

When I figured out I wasn't about to be trampled by horses, I put a pillow over my head and tried to recapture that sweet sickness-amnesia of sleep, but it wasn't going to happen. So instead I listened to an hour of dramatic shouting about horses mixed in with a bunch of hooves. Finally Emily had watched enough to know she didn't like the movie and she turned it off. I expected her to come in and check on me, wipe my brow, climb into bed. Instead the lights went off in the living room and I heard her stretch out on the couch. She was probably asleep in five minutes.

The next day I was still sick (like I said, it was a wicked case). Guess what Emily did. You got it, she went swimming.