Myrtle Beach, Day Six-and-a-Half: The Very Long Night

After a busy day seeing dolphins, eating at a questionable buffet, and playing on the beach, we all slept very soundly. At some point in the middle of the night, I smelled something that wafted through the air. It was the unmistakable scent of vomit.

"Oh," I thought to myself, "the poor neighbors. Someone must be ill and it is coming through the ventilation system."

Since our kids always cry or come running when they are sick, I didn't really wake from my sleep to think about the situation. An hour or so later, I woke to some coughing sounds and an intensified smell. I got up to check on the boys, just in case someone had been sick and hadn't come to get us for some reason. Since Nolan uses a full-face C-Pap mask, I also wanted to be sure that he wasn't in distress (though with the Nissen fundoplication, he's never been able to vomit past the stomach wrap). I walked into the room and both boys appeared to be sleeping peacefully in the dark. The smell was so intense, however, that I knew.

"THE BUFFET," I said, in a voice loaded with dread. I turned on the light, and Matthew was lying in bed, covered in vomit. He was so ill, I could not really wake him.

I called Dennis in, and he took the bed while I took the boy. Of course, the shower in the boy's bathroom decided to break at that exact moment, so I filled up the bathtub and peeled off Matt's clothes. He was extremely incoherent (and still vomiting), so I put him in the tub and cleaned him up. I called housekeeping and had them bring up new sheets - I put them on the sofa and settled Matt down with a glass mixing bowl I found in one of the kitchen cupboards.

A very sick kiddo.

He was hard to wake, and we had to make the decision whether to take him to the Emergency Room or to wait it out and see if he got better. Fortunately, we were driving home, so we had plenty of time to watch and wait. Dennis ran to Walmart to get a plastic bowl for use in the car, and we ran a few loads of laundry.

Since we were on the 12th floor, none of the windows opened for ventilation. We opened the sliding glass doors to ventilate the condo, but there was really no helping the level of "sick" that happened in our room. We ran laundry, helped Matt when he vomited, and got everything ready for our 14 hour drive back to New York.

By 7:00am, Matt seemed to have stabilized a little, so we said goodbye to the beach, apologized profusely to the staff of the hotel (we cleaned up the mess as best we could and had laundry running), and checked out. We started our long drive home, with a very sick little boy in the back seat.

Our last view of Myrtle Beach