Operation Bore My Son to Tears

is not going well.

Today is Henry's third day home sick from school. On Monday he insisted that he didn't feel well but all I could hear was "I want to play with my new birthday toys." He slipped that into his tirade regarding his various symptoms but I heard it, all right. I had him all figured out! So I dragged him there, insisted that he was fine despite his loud protestations, pried his little fingers off of me, and made a run for it. Two hours later his teacher called me. He had a fever. And was crying about ear pain when he coughed. Nice job, crappy mommy.

Once I got him home, of course he cheered right up, and spent the rest of the day playing with his brand new toys. There was nary a word about his supposed ear pain. Could a child elevate his internal body temperature, just out of an obsessive need for Legos? I suspected so.

The next day Henry was as bouncy and cheery as ever, but then I took his temperature, and damn it all, he still had a fever. A small one. Could I pump him full of Motrin and send him off? I considered it, Internet. My heart is a little smaller than a raisin. But in the end, I did not, which was a good thing, because two hours later he turned all gray and glassy-eyed and his temperature shot up to 115 or something. Okay, it was 104. Every time Henry gets sick his temperature goes up to 104. I find this somehow laudatory, because I never seem to get fevers anywhere near that high, and I remember being little and sick and miserable and wanting some impressive number that would elicit the sympathy of those around me. So here he is with 104, and I'm scared but also kind of want to high-five him. You are seriously sick, dude! Score!

Off we went to the doctor, and got some antibiotics. That part's not interesting. Actually none of this is. But this is all I have. So you just sit down and keep reading.

All of this brings us to today, Day 3 of sick leave. He's clearly better, but I wanted to play it safe, not bring him back to school only to have his teacher call to say he's still sick and p.s. you're a worse mom than we thought, and that's saying a lot. At the same time I hated the idea of keeping him at home, not just because he never stops talking ALTHOUGH THAT'S CERTAINLY PART OF IT, but because he's resisting school these days, and I don't want to reinforce that with another Super Day of School-Free Fun.

This newfound hatred of school is hard to comprehend in my child, who last year would weep like I had smothered his puppy if I told him he couldn't go to school. Who I'm sure told his teacher that he didn't want to go home because his cruel parents didn't love him like she could, and he should probably just live at the school, subsisting on graham crackers and apple juice and sleeping on the bean bag in the reading nook.

Now every morning includes at least fifteen minutes of weeping over the horrors of school, how the playground is stupid and all the kids are babies and the teachers are idiots. Because this year we can walk to his school, we get to enjoy a Bataan Death March each day, except worse. Because at least at the end of the Bataan Death march the survivors weren't forced to play in a stupid playground. And eat pretzels for snacktime.

So I'm trying to make this, our Last Sick Day, as un-fun as possible, but the kid's still enjoying himself, damn it. This morning he played with his new Play-Doh Fun Pak while I typed in the next room, first darkly announcing that I couldn't play with him because I had important work to do. (Read: I was emailing my friends.) "That's fine!" he sang, and proceeded to bounce in and out of the room, handing me intricate Play-Doh desserts and declaring that I deserved them because I'm the best mother there ever was.

"Soon," I growled, "we have to run errands," and he told me that errands are his favorite thing to do, as long as he can do them with me, because I'm his best friend. Wha? We went to the supermarket and he expressed fascination with every item on my list. Romano cheese, he informed me, smells fantastic. He shoved it against his nose and breathed in deep, beaming at me. He's either the best liar ever, or there's a hallucinogen mixed in with his antibiotics.

When we got home he asked to go to the playground, and inside I cackled with glee, my raisiny heart shrinking even further into the recesses of my chest cavity. "If you're home sick you can't go to the playground," I explained, and waited for the tears. Surely this would make school seem more palatable! Ho ho! "That's okay," he smiled. "I don't mind playing inside." And then he offered to help me unpack the groceries.

Next up: I introduce him to the vacuum. Even if he's still cheerful, hell, at least I have a clean floor.

What did I do, world?

Yesterday at 5:30 a.m., I was awakened by the Mother of All Bladder Infections. "Come into the bathroom," she whispered into my ear. "I have something to show you." I won't even tell you what that bitch did to me in there, but it was gruesome. Somehow I managed to live until 9 a.m., when my doctor's office opened, and the nurses hoisted me off the stoop and into an examining room.

I love my doctor because he's not at all nonchalant about illnesses. He is always highly alarmed by my condition, whatever it is, as if he'd never seen anything like it before. Strangely, I find this reassuring. If I'm in pain, I don't want my medical specialist to poo-poo my discomfort. So when he gasped in horror at the sight of my urine specimen--just eyeballing it made him gasp, kids! It didn't look good!--I kind of wanted to kiss him full on the mouth. It would have made an adorable story for our future children. Unfortunately we're both married, and my husband was fretting in the waiting room. Our love, it cannot be.

Anyway, he knocked me up (NOT THAT WAY) with many many drugs and I spent the rest of the day and all of the night and then most of this morning either in bed or in the can, either peeing or sleeping. Sleep, pee, sleep, pee. I was kind of like my dog. Except I have better aim.

Then this afternoon, just as I started to feel better, the phone rang. It was the woman who gave us Izzy, our brand new, incredibly adorable cat. Izzy's mom had been diagnosed with feline leukemia. For whatever reason, the cat had previously tested negative, but was now positive.

So! It appears that my kitty cat may or may not be long for this world. Anyone know anything about FeLV? Because the Internets, she is bringing me the contradictory information. And I'm trying not to cry, over here. I need all my bodily fluids, for the peeing.

EDITED TO ADD: Okay, so maybe I shouldn't read only one highly alarmist website about FeLV before posting. The one that said she had an 85% chance of dying within months. I'm trying to find it now, and can't. Probably I hallucinated it. I blame the Cipro. Yes. Ahem.

Soon they will be gone, and I will dance upon their eensy graves.

Dear pink eye:

I have had it with you, you crusty whore. Get out of my kid’s eye.

Sincerely,

Alice

Dear Alice, aka Supervisor of Most Beloved Host Body,

You know less than nothing, you giant Alice slug. We are not a “you” but a “you plural.” Once we were many, and we knew nothing but joy. We danced and sang the praises of Most Beloved Host Body, that which you call My-Kid’s-Eye, who kept us warm and safe in his lovely tide pools, who only endangered us occasionally with his Giant Hand-Digit as it disturbed our waters and brought many of us with it on a mysterious journey to Out There. But still, we loved Him. And then you arrived, raining your hot evil breath upon us as Most Beloved Host Body screamed in protest, and you brought the poisonous flood that destroyed most of our numbers. Now on top of it all you call us these names? You are this Crusty Whore of which you speak. You!

Love,

Staphylococcus #19,000,007,888,999,122,882

Dear Alice,

We heard some, how shall we say this, bloodcurdling screams and shrieking coming from your home last night. Just wondering, if, you know, we should call someone for you! Maybe find a better home for your kid! You frighten us!

We now regret giving you those housewarming brownies,

Your neighbors

Dear Neighbors of Most Beloved Host Body,

SHE IS KILLING US. One by one we die, and yet she keeps coming, drowning us in her toxic tidal waves. There are only 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 of us left. We need your help. Call governmental agencies! Help us!

Most sincerely,

Staphylococcus #18,200,000,873,2931

p.s. Come over and dip one of your Hand-Digits into our tidal pools, and perhaps we can come live on you. We mean, with you. You will revel in our brutal, tiny love.

Tartar-sauce-loving witches will dislike me after this one.

I am sorry for the my six-day absence, but I couldn’t write, as I was dying.

Late in the week I was overcome with a malaise so overpowering that my eyes would slam shut during dinner (a time when I am normally quite animated, as I am being fed—or more accurately, feeding myself, which I can do now because I’m a big big girl) and I would be overcome with the need to put my head on the table, and then I would, and I’d get tartar sauce in my hair and my husband would have to excuse himself to retch quietly in the backyard.

(Note to literalists: we don’t really have tartar sauce at dinner. And my husband usually retches right in front of me, to teach me an important lesson.)

(Not that there’s anything wrong with tartar sauce. I just can’t eat it, or look at it. Or think about it.)

Walking up the stairs became an insulting chore. My skin began to ache, which was completely uncalled for. And worst of all—adding injury to injury—my eyes wobbled whenever I tried to use the computer. I couldn’t read the words on the screen! How would I live! The words! I needed the words!

I used exclamation points like this in my daily narrative to my husband, who (correctly) thought maybe I should go to a doctor. I refused and instead looked up “sudden fatigue dizziness” and thus learned that I suffer from shin-byung and that soon I will become possessed by my ancestral spirits. I can only hope that Uncle Lou is kinder to my body than he was to his own. Lay off the saus-eege, Lou, you hear?

Anyhow: “Stop looking up culture-bound syndromes!” my husband demanded in his standard manly baritone and then begged me (in sort of a high tenor/alto II) to go a doctor. Instead I decided I was suffering eyestrain and that I should lay off the computer, even though it is my only friend, as I am on it approximately 35 hours a day.

This lasted 47 minutes, all of which I spent gasping on the floor.

And then the next day I woke up sick. Wow, wasn’t that a story? I am going to publish it. I shall call it “Dizziness Isn’t Impending Death but a Bad Cold.” Or maybe “Being Sick Sometimes Takes You By Surprise.” The New Yorker will buy it. Rich! I’ll be rich! Short story writers are incredibly wealthy, as we know.

Where was I? Yeah, so, virus, boring. Just your run of the mill, swollen-gland, painful-head syndrome. The real kicker was when Henry woke up the same morning looking like he had been in a prize fight, and lost. He stood by our bed and cried out, “I have only one eye left!” And then I got out of bed and reeled around, weeping, “Sick! I feel sick!” And poor Scott, who you may recall has a mild aversion to pink eye, shoved his head under his pillow and time-traveled to 1672, where they burned people like me as witches and pink eye was illegal because only witches got it.

The End.