A Danger to Myself and the Pulpit

Let me set the scene for the perfect storm, wherein I act in a completely embarrassing way. Please let me know if you have done something similar!

Lucy has been sick since November, with a varying abundance of snot coming out of her nose and horrible coughing keeping her up at night way too often. The nose let up running for exactly three days in these last three months, I kid you not. So we took her to the doctor--Doctor Brian Muir, a friend in our ward--a month ago. No ear infections, just lousy viruses one after another. Then we took her again and another doctor said she may have allergies. So we began giving her Zyrtec--no difference. Then Isaac got sick with a fever last Tuesday and I thought, gee, that's weird. No symptoms! The fever went away...then came back. Then he started coughing like a grown man and his talking-voice resembled Elmo's. Weird and not good, we thought. Should we take him to the doctor? (Again, I have to remind you that we don't have insurance for me or the kids so every doctor visit is more expensive than we can afford). Enter Lucy, the greediest virus-hog on earth:

And her breathing was a complete nightmare and her coughing kept all of us up (that's still going on--Doug and I haven't had a decent night's sleep since Thursday night--averaging a couple hours a night with us each taking shifts). On Sunday morning, we had already decided that I would go to sacrament meeting and then Dough would go to church to teach and I would stay home with the kids. But as I was getting ready for church, I heard Lucy upstairs gagging and gasping for air and it was worse than it had ever been. I wrapped her in blankets and took her outside while Doug called Dr. Muir to see if he had any suggestions. Dr. Muir said he'd come right over.

He checked Lucy--again no ear infection, but this time it was croup. He called in a prescription to Walgreens and went to church, saying the prescription would be ready in about twenty minutes.

So here is what I wish I'd done: I wish I'd quietly gone to church, taken the sacrament, and gone to pick up the medication. Instead...

Choking back tears of gratitude and exhaustion, I went to church, got to take the sacrament and went into the chapel. Bad idea. It was fast and testimony meeting, which means anyone can go up to the pulpit and share their beliefs and feelings about the Savior and his gospel. So I marched up there in the name of gratitude, wearing a hideous outfit, with only a little under-eye make-up and unbrushed hair (read: slept-in hair slicked back with one swipe of water!) and started my testimony off with a bang, saying, "I wouldn't be up here for you all because I'm just too embarrassed. I just wanted to say..." essentially I then began to cry, talking about how we were worried about money and our kids were sick and Brian Muir was an angel and I was grateful for angels among us, etc. So embarrassing. Then I stayed a few more minutes to hear a few testimonies and went to pick up that prescription. Which cost less than 9 dollars!

The positive side of making embarrassing declarations in public: we've gotten phone calls, cupcakes, and delicious cinnamon rolls. The downsides are obvious. But here are some pictures as a reward (?) for staying with me through a post that is too long by someone who has not had enough sleep. As a side note, I wrote our family Valentine and will post it soon. I picked the picture the most people voted on, and that was a sacrifice because I'd already written my Valentine letter based around another picture. Not that you needed to know that, but now you know I'm a conciliatory creature at times. Signing off with sweetness: