The Doodle-Flu

My youngest son a stomach-flu two weeks ago, which spread quickly to my whole nuclear family. It started on Tuesday, the week before Purim, and my last day with it was Purim itself. The symptoms were all gastric (pretty similar to the ones of the food poisoning in Airplane!; I'll see if I can find a clip).

I call it the "doodle-flu" because I call my kids 'doodles' (yeah it's cutsie-poo; there's a long story behind it, but my kids are cute so it works for them).

We knew he wasn't feeling well because he had a lack of appetite even when we were in our favorite restaurant (as you can see in this pre-dated story): the Brandeis cafeteria. Then, near the end of the meal, my youngest let loose with a truly heroic Yorq.

We were mortified (this happened a few months ago to our oldest and we think that there's an unwritten 'three-yorqs-you're-out' clause somewhere). But they were very nice about it. We thought it could have been caused by any number of factors (kids don't need excuses to boot; for the first 12 months of their lives they boot frequently), but as the night progressed we saw that it was part of a constellation of symptoms that developed into the Doodle-Flu.

Now my youngest probably got it from some of his miscreant toddler friends at day-care, and when we called our doctor's office they told us that it was running rampant through Boston.

And that's what I was willing to believe, until this morning.

In preparation for telling the Campus newspapers about my Madoff chair, I went to the website of one of the two papers, The Hoot, where I saw this headline:

Kosher food not responsible for G.I. bug
by Ariel Wittenberg
March 13, 2009

The Health Center confirmed that there was no food poisoning in Sherman Dining Hall after 29 students came to the center complaining of vomiting and diarrhea.

The complaints came from students falling ill after eating at the dining hall, specifically, in the Kosher section; however, Nursing Director Kathleen Maloney said that these students were suffering from a norovirus, or “tummy bug,” and not food poisoning.

[snip]

... [Nursing Director] Maloney said that only three of the 29 students who went to the health center with the virus reported on their health records that they followed a Kosher diet, despite the fact that rumors had speculated that Kosher food was to blame.

Jenna Rubin ’11, who chairs the Student Union’s Dining Services Committee, said that she heard the rumors of food poisoning from multiple students who, after becoming sick, refused to eat food that came from the Kosher Dining hall.

“They wouldn’t eat kosher food, so they couldn’t eat any food on campus,” she said. “They were eating chips and fruit for two days because they were so afraid of it.” [more]

Circumstantial evidence falls to blaming my young son - who is too cute for serious punishment; I still feel guilty.

Pic of a doodling bug, a doodle-bug, from here.