Aug
09

Sicker Than Your Average.

Last night after Simone had fallen asleep, I noticed that she felt hot. Scott convinced me not to take her temperature, because what kind of asshole wakes a sleeping baby, anyway?

(Was that an Organ Chord of Foreboding? Why yes! I believe it was!)

Later I went to bed, holding the baby as I usually do, but then slipped her out of my arms because her fiery skin was making me sweat.

(Note to self: A baby whose body emits enough heat to soothe the pain of menstrual cramps is A BABY THAT IS TOO WARM).

At eleven she woke up crying, and I finally took her temperature—rectally, of course. It was about 104. The highest her temperature has ever been, including the NICU.
I am some kind of parenting prodigy, obviously. I should rent myself out, or star in my own reality show, sort of an anti-Super Nanny, wherein I visit people’s homes and fail to recognize and/or treat their children’s problems.

We talked to the clinic several times during what was a long, long, LONG dark and screamy night, during which I never got more than one (1) consecutive hour of sleep. Simone’s temperature eventually hovered around 103 with Motrin, and the thought is that she has a virus, maybe the flu. This evening she is still, thought a bit less, feverish—pale and irritable, and her eyes are red and have bags under them. But then MY eyes are red and have bags under them, so who knows how much of that is due to her mysterious ailment. She’ll probably see the doctor tomorrow, if she’s still running hot.

In general, Simone’s health problems have made me more relaxed as a parent. I don’t worry much when she smacks her head or gives herself a bloody nose or eats a handful of cat food while I am distracted with a Very Important Phone Call. But when she is sick, with a virus or cold, something with potential respiratory complications, I can feel my brain spin off its tracks. I get a very particular, very horrible feeling that I am fairly certain is a sort of PTSD, and I count her respirations, and watch her lips for the blueness I have seen there before. Last night when her fever was getting worse instead of better, and her breathing was rapid, and she was hot and weak and crying, all I could see when I looked at Simone were her endlessly cloudy chest x-rays, by which, along with her morning blood gases, I used to live or die.

I think that the nurse on the phone could sense this.

“This fever will not hurt her,” she said slowly and explicitly, before giving me instructions about how high the fever could go before a trip to the ER. I thanked her, and was about to hang up when she spoke again, to tell me that even if Simone’s fever DID get high enough to warrant the emergency room, it would STILL not be high enough to cause brain damage. “She’d be uncomfortable,” the nurse said, “but she’d be fine.”

And she is fine, today. She’s sick, but she’s fine. Her breathing has slowed back down, and so has mine. Instead of being disturbed by visions of septic shock, I am disturbed by the fact that due to my compromised mental acuity last night during the OMG FEVER! crisis of aught nine, the only thing I could remember about lowering body temperature was from book number four of The Babysitters’ Club, “Mary Anne Saves the Day,” I think, in which one of Mary Anne’s charges runs a high fever and has to be bathed in rubbing alcohol. Thank god I ultimately relied on the Internet over the remembered plots of young adult novels, because it turns out that you should never bathe a baby in rubbing alcohol to bring down a fever—not that Simone was ever in any real danger, as we didn’t have any rubbing alcohol and I wasn’t about to waste a perfect good white burgundy unless I was certain it was necessary.

It concerns me that not only do I remember “Mary Anne Saves the Day,” I remember that it was BOOK NUMBER FOUR in the series. If all the space in my brain currently occupied by things like the lyrics to Notorious B.I.G. songs and episodes of My Two Dads were instead housing items like the ability to understand compound probability, I’d be a very different, possibly unstoppable Alexa.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |