On this solemn day when we pay respects to those who have sacrificed their lives for our cherished freedoms, let us not forget those who have bravely surmounted that other grave challenge to our way of life:  the unseasonal stomach flu.

It began Wednesday.  My wife Linda complained of indigestion after dinner.  An hour later I was handing her our large plastic yellow popcorn bowl and supplying her with a folded, damp wash cloth for her forehead. By her count, it was seven solid retchings.

On Thursday our ten year old Gabriel had turned ashen and sweaty, and was puking his guts out.

By 4 a.m. on Saturday morning, Rafael, our fourteen year old, began an eight hour vomit session which shocked me only in that he survived it at all.   At one point I thought I heard his lungs detach from his rib cage.  Sometimes he made it to the toilet or yellow bowl, sometimes he didn’t.  By early Saturday evening, I had thrown out our old blue comforter.   There’s no amount of dry cleaning that would get that smell out.

Throughout the ordeal of watching my three comrades fall, I had been washing my hands and every utensil and cup I used like an OCD madman.  Yes, it’s true I didn’t want to end up on my hands and knees in front of the toilet, but my motives weren’t purely selfish: after all, someone had to be well enough to keep running back and forth from the store to supply the troops with saltines and Seven Up and chicken soup.

Last night, after kicking the soccer ball around with a recuperated Gabriel, I knew something was wrong.  We had only played for about ten minutes, but I was sweating as if I had just run a marathon (not that I would know what that’s like, but one, y’know, can imagine, and I’ve seen pictures on TV).

I decided to have oatmeal for dinner, but couldn’t get past the second bite.

By ten pm I was in the bathroom on my hands and knees.  My arms went jittery and I could barely keep myself propped up as I hurled.  The smell of my own sick brought on more retching.  Beads of sweat jumped out of every pore on my face.  The pallor of my skin was a grayish yellow.  When I finally emerged from the bathroom, Linda and Rafael stood their looking at me with a mix of sympathy and disgust on their faces.

“Wow, that was loud, dad,” said Rafael.  “You okay?”

Okay? Was I “okay?”  I had just watched a pound of pancakes and bacon leave my body the wrong way, and was I “okay?”

Actually, yeah, I was alright.  Like an untested private landing at Normandy Beach, I had survived the anticipation and dread of the mission.  More than that, I had come through the shock of the actual attack alive, and now I was on the other side, exhausted, weak, wobbly, but otherwise intact.

The flu is like war….er….um…..sorta?

…man my generation’s had it too easy.