Sweet Relief After Days of Sickness and Doubt

For two weeks, our 2-year-old was sick--really sick. Sleepless-nights sick. High-fevers sick. Shrieks-of-pain-from-mouth-sores sick.

We administered Popsicles and pain relievers, tepid baths and tender caresses, antibiotics and animal picture books. Nothing worked on the intolerable virus. Even the passage of time, that most reliable curative, seemed to fail us.

The only true relief she found was in the antics of Larry, Moe and Curly. She requested “The Three Stooges” ad nauseam.

“Would you like to watch Barney?” I asked.

“No, Mommy,” she replied, sounding deeply disappointed in me. “Tooges.”

I’d put them on, but she’d watch with glazed eyes.

We were worn down by an invisible force that turned our robust cherub into a skinny, sunken-eyed waif. We would do anything to make her feel better. Stooges marathon at midnight? Why soitenly! Pudding in bed? Of course. Soda pop for breakfast? You betcha.

My daughter’s doctors have been baffled by the tenacity of the bug, concerned especially that it showed no signs of abating after the usual 10-day viral course.

Is there something amiss with her immune system, they wonder, something that allows a virus free reign?

Or is the virus so strong that it simply overwhelmed her ability to fight it, effectively shutting down her bone marrow’s production of infection-fighting blood cells?

Important questions. And, for the moment, ones without answers.

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A sick baby can really test your faith in yourself.

You think you’re a good parent, a concerned and loving parent, a hygienic parent. Yet you agonize over what you have done to cause your child this plague, and what you might have done to prevent it.

You become vulnerable to theories floated by people you barely know. Could your baby-sitter’s sister-in-law be right--that the dogs have been allowed to lick the child’s face too freely?

A sick baby sears you with the brutal truth of what it means to act in a child’s best interest.

You go to the hospital once, twice, three times, and hold her as still as you can while a sympathetic man in a white lab coat sticks a long needle in the crook of her elbow and sucks out her ruby red blood.

She is a perfect angel every time, unaware of the betrayal about to take place, as he swabs her with disinfectant, tightens a rubber strap around her arm to bring the vein into relief.

And when the needle pierces her tender baby flesh, you want to scream with her, partly because you know how much it hurts, but mostly because you can’t believe that you are the agent of this treachery.

Instead of protecting her from pain and harm, here you are--her mother, her father--offering her up to the gods of hematology in exchange for information you hope will make her well.

It’s a rotten trade-off.

In a busy life, where the one precious commodity you lack is time, you finally have it in abundance when your child is sick. Your days take on a repetitive, circular quality, very much like the first few months of her life, when all you did was feed her, change her and hold her.

For two weeks, we floated in a kind of fugue state, rising each morning certain that our daughter would feel better that day. And each night, we would turn off the lights, her febrile little body between us, downhearted but putting our trust in tomorrow.

Even though time felt suddenly languid in our house, a ring of the telephone reminded us it was operating full speed elsewhere: One day, while our daughter was in the throes of her fever, my father called to say my grandmother, who turns 90 this week on the same day my daughter turns 2, had fallen and hurt her head at the old folk’s home. She is confined to bed now and may have to be moved to a convalescent hospital.

A few days later, my mother called with news of a sharp pain in her head, requiring a four-hour emergency room visit, until doctors ruled out anything serious and sent us away.

I brought my mother to our home for the night. It happened that my adult stepdaughter was visiting from out of town and was suffering her own physical ailments, including a painful, swollen ankle.

We joked about running a hospital, not a home. Our laughter sounded forced.

The next day, my stepdaughter’s ankle suddenly felt better. A much-anticipated workout machine, ordered over the phone, finally arrived on my mother’s doorstep, and she was anxious to get home and set it up.

And finally, after two long weeks, our little girl woke up famished. She inhaled her food and asked for more. We were cautiously optimistic. Later, though, she did something that signaled the definitive restoration of health.

She pretended to walk into the bedroom wall, then grabbed her nose in mock pain and uttered three incomparably magical words:

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.