My friend's neighbor is this mawkish fellow who slumps out onto his porch to retrieve the paper each day, always coughing, snuffling or groaning meekly. When my friend offers up a word of greeting or concern, he stares at her sleepily.
"Ron. How you doing? You don't look so good."
"No, I been better. I got The Sick."
The Sick. That always struck me as the perfect phrase. You know, that certain breed of illness that seems to come from nowhere, hangs around too long, has no cure, and just feels gunky, crappy, icky. The Sick.
My son has The Sick.
The day after Christmas, my husband and I brought little Archie into bed with us, he nursed contentedly, sat up, and barfed. And barfed.
That was the beginning of a long descent into a hellish quagmire of vomiting, diarrhea, fever, rattling chest, messy nose and a hacking cough.
It's worth mentioning that we went to Mexico for a week during all of this.
We are approaching day 17 of The Sick, and I thought that when I took him to the doc a few days ago that we were in the clear; he hadn't had a fever, diarrhea or vomiting in over a week. But yesterday it all started up again, like a boorish guest who refuses to leave the dinner party and sticks around drinking all of your best liquor.
To his credit, the boy has been a real trooper through all of this. Aside from a ratched-up level of clingyness, he has smiled and babbled on through the worst of it. He'll puke and then immediately grin and squeak with joy. And when he blows out his diaper, he lays there cheerily as I frantically mop up the morbid stench from his skin and surrounding area. Even when he sounds like he might actually cough up a pudding pack, he flaps his arms and crawls around without a care in the world. If only we could all be so happily ill.
So we're back to the doc today. The on-call guy at Madrona Medical will be the third pediatrician to assess The Sick for poor Archer. Here's hoping this dinner guest finally has the good sense to call it a night.
Before Archie was sick, I was chatting with a friend at a Christmas party. She has a daughter (her first) who is one day older than Archie. I asked her if she really felt like a mother yet, at almost ten months in. She said she felt the most like a mother when Aya got sick for the first time; wanting desperately to make everything better for her child, needing the hurt to go away, feeling absolutely driven to give the best care possible.
Two days later Archie got The Sick. And I'm a mom.
