When Your Child is Sick

Everyone is always saying, "Thank God It's Friday!" but you're not thanking God much for this particular Friday. On this Friday you pick your son up from preschool and notice that his body is a torch. You notice that he is sitting in a flushed, crumpled daze in the middle of the floor clutching a random sock, and when he sees you, he literally tips over and bangs his head against the cubbies. So you scoop him up in a panic and dash past the kind but overwhelmed preschool teacher who didn't notice how fiery your son was, how absolutely delirious he was.

You take him home, dose him with Tylenol, and pull him into your bed for a nap, his temperature wavering around one oh two. You suck your teeth, and sigh, and place your hand on his head over and over until you both fall asleep. What wakes you up is your son's full-blown febrile seizure as he flops around your husband's side of the bed. You call hoarsely, desperately, for your husband who rushes in and says, "Give him room, let him finish," because there is nothing else you can do but watch and wait and say, "Oh God, Oh God." Afterwards, in his postictal state, your son can only drool, and his eyes roll around as flat and blank as unstamped pennies.Your husband takes your son's rectal temperature. It's one oh four point three. Apparently, the Tylenol didn't work.

Speaking of God, when your son is sick, your prayers become pleading. You say, "This is my only boy, my only child" as if you're suggesting that God mess with somebody else's child, someone who has more than one child. Like it would somehow be less sad for a family with extra children if there was one fewer. And you revisit your Our Fathers and your Hail Marys-- the words part of your DNA, programmed into your brain by a Catholic youth-- in the hopes that God might respect how you've held on to those old chestnuts for when you really, really need them.

In the meantime, all around you, life goes on, and you're expected to be on, too. You have students who need you in the last days of the semester. You have your own grad school classes to finish. You have a reading to perform. You can still hear the healthy children at the park rattling the metal steering wheel on the jungle gym. Christmas lights are still being strung with great cheer across the neighborhood. Everywhere your ears turn, you hear people laugh, and you think, "What the fuck are you laughing at?" You of all people become, in these dark times, a real killjoy.

Because children change you. Even in what might be construed as carefree moments, you're still dragging a great weight around behind you like a giant, jangling pull-toy.

And you're left wondering what you've done wrong. You remember that your son didn't eat Friday morning, and he seemed a little warm, a little lethargic, so you gave him a preventative dose of Motrin thinking that if he felt punk, preschool would call and you'd rush home from teaching to grab him. You find yourself saying, "How did I fail?" and "What mistake did I make?" because raising a child doesn't really leave much room for miscalculation. You think about what parents of gravely ill children must think. How they must wonder if what went wrong with their child was something they put in him. Kind of how you wonder about your son's seizure disorder. You imagine the spiral staircase of your DNA strands with missing or broken stairs.

When your child is sick, you spend a great deal of time scouring the Internet looking for answers but are only left with more fears. You think, Kawasaki's? Leukemia?? Then you remember the woman you met while riding the Griffith Park train with your son. She was there with her granddaughter, and she told you how she no longer judges people on first sight. She tells you how her two-year-old grandson was judged as fat and ill-mannered when he was actually dying from Leukemia. Amazing what impromptu lessons you can learn from strangers: Don't judge. Her granddaughter, a silent, Spanish beauty, wore small gold hoops. She touched your hand with such seriousness. After all, her family's love is a weight made heavier by her brother's death even if she never knew him.

And so you carry around worst-case scenarios in your head and play them out to farfetched happy endings. And you spend four long days chasing your son's fever trying to prevent another seizure. You set the alarm every three hours and alternate Motrin and Tylenol. You watch him waver and burn on the couch. You let him suck his thumb with his comfort dog all day. You don't care. You let him watch the same Thomas the Tank Engine movie five times in a row. You're well past simple indulgence now. You think, whatever he needs, I'll give it. Wherever I have to go, I'll go there. Kidney? Here you go. I have another. Ends of the earth? Sure. Not very far, really. Heart? It was his the minute you birthed him, anyway.

When your child is sick and you end up in the emergency room for the second time in four days because your son can no longer walk, and you're convinced it's Guillane-Barre Syndrome, you think maybe you're going to finally lose your cool because you're so sick of your little boy being sick. You're so sick of feeling like some sadistic shrew of a fate is trying to take him away, and you tick off all the scary things that have already happened in the short three years he has been around.

But then (miraculously?) in the five hours of sitting around in the ER waiting for a room in the Peds Unit, he starts to perk up. He shuffles along like Tim Conway. He cracks preschool jokes. You choose to go home instead of checking in to the hospital because hospitals are for sick children. And in the end, it really was only a virus, just a very bad one. Like the flu, which has been known to kill. You can't take it too lightly. There's no place in your life for a cavalier attitude anymore. Your boy is tired now. You're just going to let him sleep the rest of it off.