My story about horrible diarrhea and my boyfriend and our wedding.
By 1moremom
On the Monday I came home from work with what must have been food poisoning. I had got to work, walked in the door and stood there sort of out of it, my boss said 'you look terrible!" I said, 'I feel terrible' and turned around and left. I don't remember driving home. I woke up hours later across the bed still in my winter coat. I shed it and as much else as I could as this is when the diarrhea hit. I spent the next few hours alternating between the toilet and the bathroom floor wrapped in my bathrobe. Boyfriend got home around 3:30, walked a mile as we'd just moved in together in a new place and he didn't have a car and couldn't drive mine. he saw how sick I was and ran the mile to the pharmacist and back to get the strongest OTC meds possible. Then he helped me to the car and went with me so I could sit miserably waiting in the drivers seat while he went into the after school and daycare to sign out my kids. He wasn't officially on the list so I had to send a note in, and the director at each place came out to confirm/add him to the list. At both places, the director came out to confirm my intentions. Then we went home, I passed out on the bed and he was suddenly more immersed in new daddy duties than he ever had been.
Tuesday the littlest stayed home with me so I didn't have to drive and boyfriend tried to walk the oldest to school. She was all distressed over our move and his moving in and me being sick, and threw a fit on the front sidewalk because she couldn't stay home too, but nice new next door neighbor sort of knew us from previous year school events and stepped in to help calm her and get her to school, and promised to go get her later too. So at this point, boyfriend, the directors and teachers of the afterschool and daycare and the next door neighbor aaaallllll know I have a terrible case of explosive and unending diarrhea. I was too sick to even be mortified.
Wednesday morning I felt alive again. Marriage licenses in the US can be purchased up to X months in advance. We had done that a while back but as everyone I was related to was too broke and/or too far away, and everyone he was related to was overseas, we had given up on even the cheapest of weddings. The week before we had planned to go to the courthouse before our moving in together on the weekend, but the couple who was going to stand up with us had an emergency arise, so we had said we'd go this week. No worries, right? Wednesday was the first day we even remembered that. We remembered because we read in the paper that the county offices were going to be closed on Thursday and Friday. So, we either needed to get married that very day, or the next Monday or we would have to start over. We called the friends. They couldn't that day with no notice, and no, they couldn't on Monday because I don't remember why. We called other friends, their kids had chicken pox so they couldn't come that day or likely not Monday. We took a chance and called my brothers who lived two hours away: both their cars were too crap to try to drive that far and their cars wouldn't improve by Monday. This is in the US, so there weren't trains at all or time for the intercity bus.
So, we all put on our best clothes and went to the courthouse prepared to simply allow employees or another couple in line to be our witnesses. the whole thing was a formality needed to begin changing his visa status so trying to make an event of it had only been because it's sort of expected, we regretted not just getting married the day we got the license. In the end, we had a stranger and my 7 year old daughter, who had demonstrated she could sign her entire name in cursive and the clerk said that was all that was required.
Then the 4 of us went to dinner. In the middle of dinner, my new husband said he felt terrible and I told him he looked terrible, and I paid for the meal while they wrapped it all up to take home. I had to hold him up on the walk to the car and we barely made it home before he was as sick as I was on Monday. By Saturday, the children were ill as well.
Bizarrely, on our first wedding anniversary we jointly had the flu. We both had colds on our second. It's been decades now, but we still start getting very health and safety minded the week before our anniversary, lots of hand washing and Dettol spraying. So romantic.