Weekend Fun?

So I alluded to the fact that my house had turned into a den of pestilence. Here’s the lowdown:

Molly, diagnosed with strep at Urgent Care LAST Saturday, took a big turn for the worse on Friday night. She puked all night and well into Saturday. By Saturday afternoon, at which time Tom and Jake were conspicuously absent at a Boy Scout Camp out, she was lethargic and her temperature was 104.5. A rash indicated Scarlet Fever.

And due to the fact that her mother had so stupidly challenged the sick gods by bragging that a) her kids hadn’t been sick in a while and b) in 11 years she’d never had to take a kid to the ER, we soon found little Molly in the hospital with an IV in her arm.

Seven hours later we got to come home. And now, Monday morning, she appears to be on the mend. She is, in fact, eating a toasted bagel as I type.

So what did these 2 ½ weeks, I mean days, teach me?

Hospitals are probably not the cleanest places to be. 5 of the 8 or 9 professionals who looked at her said things like. “Oh, she probably picked up a really bad bug while at Urgent Care.” Not really what I want to hear when my baby is in your facility, limp as a noodle.

Sometimes the idea of puking is almost as bad as the act. At first Molly refused to believe she was going to puke. She went through the stages of denial, then anger. She railed at me, and at God. If I tried to get a bucket in puking distance, she would scream and swat it away. This led to some real free-form puking and a heck of a lot of laundry for me. Fully broken by the end of day 2, she was clinging to the toilet with her face resting on it. Acceptance had come.

Bodily functions, while very normal-seeming when a child is a baby, take on a more Linda Blair-ish tone when the child is almost 9.

Sometimes Mom is wrong. When we pulled up to the ER, Molly asked. “Mommy, Is this one of those places with tubes?” I assured her it wasn’t. Within minutes, Molly had her own tubes going in her arm, one with antibiotics, one with saline.

If you are tired enough, and your child is sick enough, you’ll sleep next to her in a bed full of diarrhea rather than disturb her.

If your husband is tired enough after watching Sports Center, and his wife is “sleeping” sitting up on the couch with his daughter for the umpteenth hour in row, he’ll go to sleep on a bare mattress even though the clean sheets are washed and ready to put back on. Stay tuned: this could turn into a Ray/Debra Romano-type stand-off.

I think the biggest thing I learned is that having a sick child is scary. My heart aches for moms with chronically ill and critically ill kids. You see, Molly missed a trip to the zoo, her soccer game, and cupcakes at her teacher’s house. But she’s doing well and by tomorrow she’ll be up and about and telling me that my clothes don’t match. This was a blip in her life story. Other moms are not as fortunate.

I am so grateful that when Molly cried, “This is the worst day of my life,” I could say, “Yes, I bet it is.”