Love in the Time of Probably Not Cholera.

My god, Simone is STILL sick. Technically it has only been eight days, but it feels like more. Many, many more. SO many more! I haven’t left the house since…I don’t remember when I last left the house. Maybe the Monday before this past one? Did I go somewhere that day, the day before we were first visited by the Angel of Ailment, by Our Lady of Perpetual Mucus? I hope so. I hope I had a wonderful time.

I finally broke down and called the pediatrician, because Simone started doing this THING, where she will not take a breath for several (very LONG-seeming) seconds, and then breathe heavily through her mouth a few times before another pause. Now, it’s not as if she’s turning blue, or looking like she can’t breathe, or even holding her breath with her mouth closed. No: she’ll be going about her business—coloring, or feeding her baby with a xylophone mallet—yet neglecting to breathe, unruffled.
MADDENING.
It’s like when she was a baby: you know how babies do “periodic breathing?” Breathe breathe stop? Breathe breathe stop? It’s that, except she is two years old and knows full well how to breathe regularly, and it was hard-won knowledge, knowledge that involved oxygen tanks and apnea monitors and ventilators and so to see her just not…Well.

["Take a BREATH!" I've shrilled several times, with something between fury and terror, "Simone Lee Wisgerhof, you breathe THIS INSTANT!" And if that isn't the stupidest thing you've ever heard, you obviously need to move in different circles than you do currently.]

Babies are “obligate nose-breathers,” and it appears that Simone has retained her lack of interest in other channels. Finding her nose otherwise occupied, she refrains from respiring at all until she is overruled by the the weensy kernel of her brain in which reason resides, and is made to breathe through her mouth to catch up. I feel, however, that whatever nose-breathing obligations she might have had ought properly to have lapsed by now.

I tried to explain all this to the nurse at my pediatrician’s office, even going so far as to hold the phone up to Simone, who was delighted to be getting a call at last. The nurse quite patently had no idea what I was talking about, and quite possibly thought I had relinquished my grip on sanity, but gently assured me that based upon the presence of certain symptoms and the utter lack of certain others, my daughter was suffering from nothing but a cold. A bad cold, maybe, but still: Only a Cold. A common one, at that.

We have the Pulmicort, and Albuterol as needed; the problem is that I can hear her. If you’ve ever had a baby prone to spells of NOT BREATHING, real ones, the sort that come with blue lips and ambu-bags, you’ll find that your ear is sensitized to the rhythm of her breath. I’ll bet that at Simone’s high school graduation, in an auditorium filled with squealing, chattering, excited folk, I will be able to hear (or, perhaps more accurately, sense) each of her in- and exhales. Now, even if she is playing on the other side of the room, I tense when she pauses, when she is NOT BREATHING as she fills a discarded paper bag with plastic teacups and wooden oranges, and it drives me entirely, THOROUGHLY mad.

Adding icicle to injury, we have no heat. The radiators have long since been turned off for the season, based upon the reasonable assumption that by MID-MAY the risk of freezing weather would have passed. And do you know what happens when you assume? Your tenants are forced to wear heavy sweaters and run their ovens all day and implore pint-sized nudists to remain clothed and FINE, you can take off your socks, but now I’ll have to examine your toenails every hour or so to make sure they are blue only from cold and not from lack of oxygen.

As a result of the chill I’ve developed a mysterious case of right-sided Ice Hand that nothing seems to allay. I try to slip my hand into warm spaces, like between couch cushions (Still cold! Fucking leather!) or under Scott’s chin, by his neck (He shoos it away, insisting it feels like a fish) but it’s no use. Even now, I am typing stiffly with my right, while my left trips merrily over the keys.

Simone, you will notice, remained unperturbed—and was well enough to prepare a lamb dinner for two:

I think that’s a cucumber in there, but I can’t be certain. A Greek recipe, perhaps?