Sick time, vacation time and outprocessing

My husband finally got his paperwork to start outprocessing on March 3. He had planned to start working on it as quickly as he could on March 4, 5 and 8 before we left for a week of vacation on March 9, but you know what they say about the best laid plans.

It started the night of March 2. I put the baby to bed and about 2 hours later, I heard her making coughing noises. After 3 of these episodes in an hour's time, I finally went into her room to rub her back to get her back to sleep.

About 20 minutes later, she did it again and it sounded like more than a cough - I went into her room again and actually turned on the light to find my poor baby lying in a huge puddle of puke! It was immediately evident to me that each time I thought she'd awakened coughing, she was actually puking and had been lying in this puddle for an hour! I felt soooooo bad, mother of the year right here, let me tell you.

So I got her all cleaned up with a middle of the night bath and then she and I layed on the couch for the rest of the night. She never got sick again, but had 2 bouts of diarrhea later in the day. That was it.

The rest of Wednesday went by without incident. Thursday morning as soon as I woke up around 7am, I immediately knew I was sick too. I layed in bed while my stomach churned and dozed back off to sleep, hoping to just sleep it off. Suddenly, my body jolted me awake and I knew I needed the bathroom immediately. From 7:30 to 11:45am, I must have vomited at least 15 times - I was averaging 4 times an hour, about every 15 minutes. Around 8:30, I called my husband and begged him to come home if there was any possible way that he could. He was granted permission to leave and thank goodness because I literally could not care for my daughter. All I could do was lay in bed or on the bathroom floor for the rest of the day. I can say with 100% certainty that I have never been more ill in my entire life. EVER. It actually ended up taking my digestive tract 12 days to make a full recovery, but I fully admit that the crap I ate on vacation probably didn't help the recovery process along (don't worry, we didn't travel while sick - we traveled a full 48 hours after the symptoms stopped - but our digestive tracts were all screwed up for several days more)

Friday morning, my husband woke up around 5:30, bolted out of bed and into the bathroom to get sick. Then the silly goose proclaimed he felt GREAT and would be going to work as usual. Thankfully, I don't know of anyone who caught the illness at his work...we've since determined we had caught the highly contagious norovirus that's broken out across the entire country right now. He came home around 11:30 because he was so sick.

That following Monday, he had to catch up on all of his work from Thursday and Friday and didn't get the chance to start outprocessing. Tuesday morning, we left for a trip to Disney World. This past Wednesday after we returned from vacation, he had to catch up on work and then finally this past Thursday he was able to start out processing. Now we have our daughter's medical clearance holding things up. She has to go before the medical board this Thursday and then they have to send their paperwork to the new base and they "estimated" a 2-week turnaround time, but we know this is the military and that's pure crap.

So it looks like we're going to end up doing a DITY (Do IT Yourself)move because by the time he receives his orders, it will be the end of April (likely....though maybe even early May) and we probably won't have time to coordinate with the moving office before he needs to be down there in mid-May. This is a really sore subject right now. Like...REALLY sore. Probably the sorest military subject ever.

I love how we've wanted orders for so long to get away from here and now he finally has them, but they're really short notice, the MPF and another entity sat on the paperwork for an eternity and he only got his clearance to start outprocessing a full 5 weeks after receiving the orders...when there was only 16 weeks between getting orders and needing to be at the new base to begin with. Then 2 more weeks were "wasted" on sickness and vacation. Now how many weeks will be "wasted" on obtaining my daughter's medical clearance? Who in Pete's name knows. All I know is that if these orders fall through because of all of this crap, I suspect he won't be re-enlisting or trying to go for a commission anymore. I think he'll end his career after 10 years, which really sucks because that's halfway to retirement. But this base sucks the life out of everything for us and we NEED a change, plain and simple. We NEED it, there is no further future for us in this area of the US.