A Norwalk on the wild side

It’s a scary world out there, kids, and getting more frightening as days go by. People are being stabbed in the street (witness the death of a U.S. sailor in Halifax last weekend), vandalism is rampant and armed robbery more frequent.

But of all the things that make this mudball intimidating, I’d say that sudden and gut-wrenching illness ranks right up there with violent crime.

Both are random and don’t discriminate, although the saving grace when it comes to crime is the possibility of flight or simply handing over your belongings and praying that’s all the crook desires.

Sudden illness is never like that. It comes completely out of the blue and hammers you pretty hard, and the recent arrival of the Norwalk virus into our community is a perfect case in point.

Norwalk is a norovirus that produces gastroenteritis. Symptoms include nausea with vomiting, diarrhea or cramps. Vomiting occurs most often in children while adults have to deal with problems at the other end of the anatomy, if you get my drift.

Suffice to say it’s unpleasant and we have virtually no defense against it. It’s highly communicable, survives on surfaces for some time after contact and seems to kick in even though you could say you were feeling well just prior to onset.

The recent outbreaks in New Brunswick and Antigonish left me, if you’ll pardon the pun, with a sick feeling in my stomach when I heard the news.

And even though health officials here didn’t think there was any cause for concern, I have two little ones who catch just about anything going. Then we heard that a Norwalk-like virus was detected at Wolfville Elementary School and I thought, “Well, that’s the ball game.�

Sure enough, the bug hit our big boy over the weekend. He was fine and then he wasn’t. He was up vomiting Friday night, had a couple of spectacular explosions all over Dad the following evening and produced a number of pukes in-between that had us washing articles of clothing and bedsheets like there was no tomorrow.

I don’t like when the kids get sick because dehydration is a genuine concern for anyone under the age of four when it comes to Norwalk. It’s so aggressive in its assault that you’re evacuating at one end or the other at least a couple of times an hour (and that’s a mild case!).

Encouraging a child to keep drinking during all this requires negotiation skills more suitable to the UN than a darkened bedroom at four in the morning. It’s a no-win situation and you can only hope that the bug persists on the low end of the usual 24 to 72-hour window characteristic of Norwalk-like virus infection.

Needless to say, it was a happening weekend. What’s troubling is how widespread this is and how easily healthy people can be laid low.

Norwalk is a small example of just how defenseless we are and I wonder how crucial to our susceptibility is the environmental milieu in which we live.

Have our bodies been altered in some way over generations so as to allow such things as norovirus virtual carte blanche?

I don’t have the answer, but I must ask the question. In the meantime, I’ll keep the buckets handy and hope like hell I’m not its next victim.