Dealing with Sickness – A Drawback of RV Life
We have been living full time in our RV now for about six months. In that time, we have dealt with changes to our food, clothes, how we live and most recently, dealing with sickness. It is a big change over what we lived in before. We own an almost 2000 sq ft house that sits on almost 14 acres. Our house sits on top of a hill so we can see about 40 miles in almost every direction. It sits about ten feet lower than the highest point in the county which is just to the west of our house.
The Food We Buy
We went from a 2000 sq ft house to a RV that was about 350 sq ft! This presented us with several challenges. We have managed to make it through them all so far. We have had to change a lot of what we do and how we do it. Things like grocery shopping and how much food we kept on hand. We have a good sized pantry in our camper, which was one of the reasons that we bought the RV we have.
In our house, we had a 7 x 13 pantry. We had so much room for food that we would buy for two weeks at a time. Some things that we would get would even be for a month at a time. Honestly though, feeding a family of five, three meals a day, it takes a lot of room when you buy for two weeks at a time.
When we bought our RV, we were still under that mind set, so one of the things that we looked for in a camper was a floor plan with a pantry. After months of searching, we found the Kodiak Ultra-lite 332BHSL. It had a very large pantry, so we could buy food for a week at a time at the very least.
Doing Laundry
Laundry! Now that was a totally different beast. It doesn’t matter what life changes you make, you still have a ton of clothes when you have five people making dirty clothes.
When we first started camping on the weekends, it wasn’t really an issue. We would take like three pairs of clothes, do our camping and then wash while we were at home…no big deal.
Once we changed to camping for several weeks at time, the no big deal, became a big deal. First off, we only had clothes storage room for maybe a week and that was pushing it. While we were at home, my wife would typically do a load of laundry every day. Once we were living in our RV for longer, we no longer had that option. Our options were either pay $5 a load every day to do laundry, or go to our house once or twice a week and do several loads of laundry.
Going the first route would amount to about $30 a week in laundry. That route really wasn’t feasible. With the second route, my wife would end up spending all day at our house doing laundry and would be away from the family. While that option was a lot cheaper, it wouldn’t work in the long run. It also didn’t really work with our family dynamic.
We knew that our RV had washer/dryer hookups, but they were located in the pantry that we needed for food storage. So we had to ask ourselves, if buying a washer/dryer combo for our RV was worth the trade off of not having the pantry for food storage anymore. After days of talking about it and exploring other options, we finally came up with a plan.
Was it a perfect plan, not really, but it worked at the time. We bought a washer/dryer combo, and took out our couch to put shelves for our food in its place. At the time, we really didn’t use the couch and honestly, it really wasn’t that comfortable anyway.
Little did we know that we would change our mind again a few months later and have to come up with another plan, but that’s for another blog post.
Dealing with Sickness
These are just two of the challenges that we has faced. They were relatively easy compared to what we have faced the last week, dealing with sickness in a confined space. On New Years Day, one of our friend’s daughter called my wife and said that something was wrong with her mom and asked her to take her to the ER. Being the good friends that we are, my wife jumped into action and took her to the ER without hesitation.
She ended up having the Flu type A. After taking her to the hospital and back home, my wife was exposed. It didn’t matter how many times she washed her hands or the mask she was wearing, she still started to get sick the next morning. Two of our kids followed her down the rabbit hole later that day. Our middle child and myself fought it off until the following day.
For the next four days, we huddled in our camper, rarely seeing the outside world and not being able to hang out with any of our friends. It was one thing when we lived in our old house because we had a lot more room to do things inside and we honestly didn’t have any friends. In the last six months we have made several really good friends and cut our living space down to about a fifth of what it was.
We have only had this happen one of time in since we had our kids where everyone was sick and that was in 2019 when Covid hit and we all got it over Christmas break. However, even that was no where near what this was. None of us really got sick then. This time, however, it hit everyone like a ton of bricks! We went through four bottles of over the counter medicine between the five of us before we could get our kids into see their doctor.
We also picked up a Vicks Sinus Inhaler that worked pretty good on clearing up our sinuses. I highly recommend getting one of these if you suffer from allergies or for when you get a cold. Another thing that we got to try was a bottle of Boost Oxygen.
It was not a very fun week!
When we did finally get them in to see their doctor, she prescribed them Tamiflu. Okay, great! Unfortunately, I think all the Tamiflu did was restart their flu because they were getting better but a couple days after they started taking it, they started to get worse again.
Oh the joys of being a parent with sick kids! Am I right?
What kind of the things do you do to help protect your family from getting sick, and when they do get sick, what do you do to combat it?