My Trousers Are Falling Down

A year ago this morning I weighed 195 pounds. This morning I weigh 184 pounds.

I know this because I’ve been weighing myself on a wifi-enabled bathroom scale for the last year:

That I weigh 11 pounds less year-over-year is not so much an accomplishment as a side-effect, more an accumulation of accidental fitness, shifting from eating lunch out to eating lunch at home, the prostrating effects of grief and, over the last week, an unnatural dip due a nasty bout of gastroenteritis (that I do not recommend, at all, as a weight loss program).

The most noticeable effect of this, day to day, is that I’ve been having trouble keeping my trousers up.

For years I wore trousers with a 38 inch waist and a 30 inch inseam (we Rukavina boys were gifted long torsos and short legs from our father); six months ago I realized that I could wear trousers with a 36 inch waist, at least in Levi jeans. And that helped. But I still had trouble keeping my pants from falling down.

I found the solution this morning–duh!–was simply to punch another hole in my belt, an inch upstream from the last one. Now–ta da!–my trousers stay up just fine.

The GI bug manifested itself first in Oliver: he barfed all over the living room on Sunday afternoon, and developed a low-grade fever, chills and a headache. Once I’d dealt with coronavirus fears–it’s a breathing thing, not a barfing thing, it turns out–I settled him into a routine of small sips of water and pieces of toast and we hunkered down for his recovery.

Then, on Monday, 24 hours after Oliver, just as it seemed like we’d turned a corner, my own guts unloaded. Fortunately not all over the living room. And I developed the same symptoms as his.

Tuesday I was more catatonic than I’d been in forever: there were times that I literally could not get out of bed. Oliver was well enough by this point, fortunately, that he could be relatively self-contained as long as I rousted myself to bring him a glass of water and a piece of toast every once in a while.

By Wednesday we were both tentatively on the mend: we kept down a bagel and peanut butter, and some plain rice. I folded the mountain of clean laundry that had been accumulating on the laundry room floor.

Today Oliver’s home for the day–his last, I’m hopeful, before returning to his regular routine–and I’ve dipped my toe back into the office. I had some cereal and a cup of coffee for breakfast and, well, so far so good.

All in all not something I’d wish on anyone, but compared to the coronavirus, a walk in the park.

I didn’t leave the house for three days and already had touches of cabin fever and could not watch another episode of Seinfeld.

Fourteen days of self-isolation? I have newfound empathy for the self-isolating around the world.