Down With the Sickness

My baby got all these medieval ailments.  So far she’s had croup AND hand, foot and mouth diseases -Trixie’s a real Renaissance woman!  

Obviously it’s hard on us when she’s sick because it requires a great deal of extra work. Our lives, which we've grown accustomed to being run by the tyrannical rule of a baby, are now subject to the dictatorial whims of millions of microscopic germs. Their rule is marked by torrents of tears and floods of diarrhea. If she's really sick or running a fever, to free ourselves from the rule of these despotic, scatological germs we have to seek the help of medical institutions. 

Doctors, nurses and insurance companies allegedly exist for the sake of public welfare despite the fact that dealing with them usually makes me want to blow my brains out.  When Trixie was diagnosed with croup, our pediatrician, who we really like, prescribed exactly three (3) doses of the steroid Trixie needed. Not one drop more, not one drop less. She needed to take all three doses, everyone was clear on that. But neither the pediatrician, the nurse, nor the pharmacist warned us about the taste of this medicine. We tried to give Trixie the first dose and she spit it everywhere. We tried the second dose with a spoonful of sugar as advised by Dr. Mary Poppins and we had a sticky mess on our hands. She wouldn’t even open her mouth for the third dose, so my wife and I tried the elixir. It tasted like crushed up aspirin mixed with bug spray.  In college, I choked down magic mushrooms grown in cow shit to expand my mind (it worked!) but I wouldn’t eat this medicine we were supposed to give my baby if my life depended on it. As it turned out, her life depended on it. These gross-tasting steroids were going to help her lungs get strong enough to breathe. We called the pediatrician, who told us we had to go to the ER so a different set of doctors and nurses could give Trixie a dose intravenously. For reasons I still don't understand, our pediatrician couldn't just call the hospital and tell them what we needed. Everyone at the ER was super eager to see the baby and I suppose I appreciated the care they took, but we were there for over four hours. Four hours (4) to get her the exact shot we knew we needed when we arrived. All this time in the ER proved expensive. The visit cost over $1,500 (American dollars!) for a shot the pediatrician should have given my daughter twelve hours prior when we first got the croup diagnosis. At least that's my medical opinion (I have an MFA in Writing for Screen and Television and I've seen most of the first four seasons of ER).

When my baby started at her new daycare this summer, I was elated to potentially have Wednesdays off from fatherhood.  But, we soon learned that being around a new group of kids means being around a new group of germs. Trixie’s gotten sick twice this summer and missed daycare both days, so we got to spend $110 a day for daycare she didn’t attend while I spent what was supposed to be my day off with a sick child.  It was from daycare that she got hand, foot and mouth disease, which made her irritable and fevery. Fortunately, we knew how to treat a fever without an ER visit, so we just cycled her on delicious Motrin and Tylenol until the illness ran its course. Of course, once the baby was cured it was time for my wife and I to get sick.  We both got hand, foot and mouth disease but not croup. We’ve definitely picked up coughs and runny noses from the kids at daycare too. My nose is like Forrest Gump now, it just started running and may never stop. 

While it’s easy to blame other kids for getting us adults sick, the worst illness I’ve gotten (so far) due to being a dad was nobody’s fault but my own. My runny nose and I were changing a poopy diaper, because fatherhood persists.  I wiped the baby down, threw out the old diaper, put a new diaper on her and without thinking about it at all, I used part of my hand to rub my nose while my finger wiped something from my eye. Immediately I realized my mistake. I thought maybe I could get away with it but I woke up the next morning with both eyes crusted over and inflamed pink, exactly how I hoped I would look for my meeting with the Associate Provost that morning.  Nothing says you can continue to trust my leadership abilities, judgement and vision like an infection everyone knows is caused by getting literal shit in your eye.

The most difficult aspects of Trixie being sick are the anxiety it produces and the complete feeling of a loss of control.  I worry for her safety, I get frustrated when things don’t go my way. I was like a bull in a pen waiting those four hours (4!) in the ER. (How DARE other people need medical attention!) When my daughter is sick the uncertainty of life is really amplified. It can often feel overwhelming. And she wasn’t even really that sick!  Most of the activities people concern themselves with everyday are designed to make us forget about our vulnerability and lack of real agency in an often cruel and indifferent world.  Illnesses in adults and particularly children obliterate this state of denial and force us to see the true, unstable and impermanent nature of existence. These aspects of existence aren’t pleasant, but they are objectively real and they are issues we must all grapple with whether we like it or not. Spoiler Alert: nobody is getting out of here alive and none of us get to choose when we leave.  In this regard, my daughter’s sickness is actually medicinal because it breaks me from the illusion that my life is safe, easy or under control and forces me to practice letting go of my assumptions, sense of comfort and delusions of stability. That isn’t to say I hope she gets ill, obviously.  We have friends whose son had cancer and their struggle was unimaginable in the sense that I could sort of imagine what it would be like for our kid to have cancer and I absolutely don’t ever want to think about it again. He’s better now, but the trauma lingers. Suffice to say, the "medicinal" harsh life lessons they got about instability and a lack of control probably feel like an overdose (or worse).  Should the unthinkable happen and my child be stricken with serious illness, I will almost certainly (and almost immediately) rethink my Pollyanna opinions on the hidden virtues of childhood illnesses. But, for now, I’m trying to learn what I can from the struggles of fatherhood, and, as always, struggling to keep the shit on my fingers from getting into my eyes. (Sadly, that it not a metaphor).