My kids’ school suspended face-to-face classes for the entire week. I thought it was because of the vog (as Taal Volcano is acting up again), but my sister said (whose son also goes to the same school but is still in elementary) it’s because many students are down with acute respiratory tract infection (ARTI). It’s the same thing that hit my twins a few weeks ago that eventually led to asthma.

This is what our pediatricians told us: since the beginning of the school year—the first time they have been holding face-to-face classes everyday—a lot of children have become sick. It seems like there is an epidemic of rhinovirus and flu and hospitals are filling up with pediatric cases of ARTI. When we were confined in our first hospital, the entire wing was filled up with patients under the care of my older sister’s best friend (who was our attending pediatrician at that time). She told us that it was hard to get rooms for kids in most hospitals in our province. It was same thing with PGH, I was told.

Immunity debt, that’s what they call it. While this theory is still being debated, I do believe the confinement of children at home for two years kept them away from common colds and flu. My kids normally had asthma every quarter or every two months when they had regular school before the pandemic. During the homeschool/online school of the past two years, however, they rarely or never had asthma attacks. I don’t know if this is the reason why Twin A became susceptible to MTB infection. It’s something I have to ask our IDS, when she is already ok.

Well, this works out well for us since FMAB Radiology insisted that our MRI schedule is on Thursday (instead of the 4th week of Oct). That means Twin A doesn’t have to miss too many classes. She can still go online before she gets sedated for the procedure at 1 pm.

This is to remind myself that I can buy myself pretty flowers and nurture them so the beauty will linger. I don’t have to wait for anyone to buy these for me.

I need some kind of serotonin boost these days after living on adrenalin alone the past two months. I swear, the only things that kept me going during the weeks I had been intensively taking care of Twin A were adrenalin (how I functioned with hardly any sleep is still a wonder) and prayers.

Now that things have quieted down, my body is screaming for some kind of rest, like honest-to-goodness rest, and serotonin. I feel like my body is giving out. I’m so tired but I needed to function still.

And to think I was battling Covid as well when Twin A had it. Only adrenalin kept me going even though my body was almost giving in to the symptoms (I had flu-like symptoms and didn’t tell the doctors I was feeling feverish for two days). I couldn’t afford to be bogged down by illness at that time—it was the height of Twin A’s illness. She was vomiting everything, had constant high fever, she was barely eating, had debilitating headaches, weakness, abdominal pains and a host of other symptoms. I had to be strong for her so she would also be in good spirits.

I am not a super woman. Now my body is saying that it’s payback time. It wants to shut down.