On Having the Crud

I’ve been lucky, blessed if you will, with a child with an incredible immune system. I like to think it was the months of breastfeeding, where I supplied him with all my super-human teacher antibodies, but it’s probably just luck of the draw. (By the way, I also took the credit for his 100% hearing ability when they did the test directly after his birth. I chalked that one up to months of prenatal vitamins and organic chicken). Well anyway, he’s had few very minor bugs, but this week is really the first week he has been down and out sick for several days. Thankfully this bug didn’t involve barfing, but it did include a whopping fever, a phlegmy cough, a lack of appetite, an increase in whining that escalated to crying and then screaming, and (in between crying fits) a listless child who wanted to do nothing but lay on the couch and watch Mickey’s Clubhouse.

The first day I worried about his TV consumption; everyday after that was simply survival. By the second day of no eating I was willing to feed the kid hot dogs and velveeta til the cows came home if it meant real substance. In addition, any rules about pacifiers and sleeping in bed with mom and dad? Out the window.

He really was fine. It was a bad cold that turned into an ear infection, but it really makes me question some of my values (of course it does, you’re thinking, you make mountains out of molehills and favor overused phrases!). Well I don’t like the idea of antibiotics and dose after dose of artificially-flavored Tylenol. I also don’t like to see my baby watch hours and hours of TV or cry “Miiiickeeeey!” in the middle of the night. But when you, as a parent, have reached your max, it becomes (as I mentioned earlier) SURVIVAL.

My husband had the bug a week earlier and was still erupting in coughing fits every couple minutes (including all night long) and I, because of those amazing antibodies, had convinced myself that I was going to be fine (despite the dozens of times when Dylan coughed directly into my sleeping face at 3am). But by Wednesday, even I felt like crud. So here we are: all three of us in bed at 7:00, feverish, glassy-eyed, watching Mickey’s Clubhouse, taking turns coughing like some sort of out-of-sync orchestra. It wasn’t pretty.

I juiced the hell out of some oranges and lemons because I really believed that that vitamin C would help us. I made Chris experiment with Vick’s on the bottoms of his feet to see it would help the cough. I actually tried to convince him to experiment with several different holistic treatments that I found online, but the Vicks was the only one he would entertain. In the end, however, Chris indulged in Nyquil and the doctor prescribed an antibiotic for Dylan. I tried to integrate tea into my coffee-laden life, but in the end, what I really want is a handful of ibuprofen and a bottle of Nyquil. By my 4^th hour class today I had only a squeak of a voice left and while the kids thought it was hilarious to hear me attempt to speak, I instead showed an episode of Modern Family and called it a day. And, while I don’t feel nearly as sick as I sound, I am exhausted. Exhausted from being up with Dylan all night this week, from waking up to cough, and from waking up when Chris coughs. My plan is to leave work immediately at 2:30 and rush home to take an hour nap so that I can pick Dylan up from daycare by 4:00. I’ll probably give in and take some drugs too.

I write this only to say to the dozens of people who have posted “feel crappy” as facebook statuses in the last week – I FEEL YOUR PAIN! And also to remind myself mostly that this quest for eating healthy, living healthy, and being healthy is bound to have a few setbacks along the way.