Sick Day Decisions

It’s rather amazing what two months in the car with someone can do. I barely knew Megan when we left Oakland (aka, home) and I’m guessing the concept of being sick in front of one another, while certainly a possibility, felt like a dim reality. But after 45 states and 51 dates, neither of us seemed to feel any sense of “Whoa, too much!” when I was sitting in the room while Megs’ stomach expressed having the flu.

This wasn’t the first sick day we’d spent together. There was that fateful night in Pennsylvania at Mt. Nittany, where I never managed to fall asleep and wound up heading to the ER in severe side pain (and where Megs had the distinct pleasure of being in the room while a nurse took a needle to my gluteus maximus. You haven’t lived until a male nurse asks you to pull down your pants and bend over in front of your producer).

Thankfully, we were sick in Denver (by “we” I mean Megan, but man it gets hard to separate the two of us and our feelings after awhile. Our moods were nearly interchangeable, our energy levels matched) in the comfort of Megs’ family and a familiar space. I washed my hands a lot, crossed my fingers I wouldn’t be witnessing any of my dinner in the middle of the night, and went to sleep.

Come morning, I discovered two things about the T and MA’s place in Denver. First is that the scenery looked one heck of a lot like Everwood which made me sing the song my friend Sean had made up about the TV show. I may or may not have watched that show strictly because Emily Van Camp is really hard not to look at (which is also probably or probably not why Sean watched the show with me). The second thing I discovered is that we were still housing a Megan that was way too ill to film a date, let alone sit up for more than about two and a quarter seconds (I timed her).

We went into full on crisis aversion mode (again with the “we” though what this really meant was me). First, I laid out my options to T and MA. Do I film the date? Do I bring one of them along (they totally offered which was beyond kind of them)? Do we cross our fingers and hope Megan felt better the next day (meaning flake on the date I had and risk not having one)? Do we reschedule the rest of our trip? Holy bologna, the rest of the trip…how would this impact our itinerary? Who did I need to call? What did Noah think of everything and could I guess without having to call him just yet? Throughout all this, Megan stomach continued its flu expressions while Meg tried to weigh in but mostly just lay still.

It was finally decided to scrap the original date plan (a movie and maybe a drink – we wanted to go classic date-style) and for me to film the date myself just in case we weren’t able to get a chance in Colorado again and in case I came down with a serious case of stomach influenza. We had a plan. Noah approved of the plan. And now, we had to activate the plan. Or at least, I had to activate the plan.

Insert a healthy dose of fear right about here.

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