Lion and Magic Boy

The germs, they finally caught up with me.

I don’t know, maybe it was being coughed on forty-zillion times in the past few weeks.

[Come here, Mama, she whispers weakly. I want to tell you something. I bend down, eager to hear what is of such import that my child, my spawn, must impart to me with her few oxygen-starved breaths, with her fever and semi-Waldorf-approved videotape-addled brain. What could it be? The secret of the universe? Her last will and testament? What?

Closer, she croaks.

I bend still closer, doing my momly, nay, my patriotic duty, listening to the fevered warblings of a seven-year old.

Suddenly, her face contorts. I know what is coming yet I am powerless to stop it.

Uuuuaghaaghaghaghaaagh! she coughs, directly into my face.]

Or….it could be the Twin Rivers O’ Mucous festooning nearly every surface in the house, courtesy of this boy.

Regardless of the cause, I only know that I awoke Sunday after a devil-may-care-fuck-it-all Saturday night feeling…tired. And somehow…off. So over and over I repeated, “I am not getting sick, I am feeling better and better all the time, I am feeling better and better all the time”, and it worked! For awhile. Long enough to make french toast to commemorate Serena’s First Day Of Feeling Like Eating Something In Days, and to vacuum the accumulated cat fur and other detritus from the crevices in the stairs, and to do all manner of laundry and other head-of-household type duties, as well as to help Serena organize and execute a very cool surprise treasure hunt game for Nathaniel, complete with clues and a prize, which had him looking all over the house and us finally yelling “Hot!” or “Cold!” because I GUESS some of clues were a little too ambiguous, though they were perfectly obvious to me.

But then I began noticing how very cold it was, and I kept asking everyone, “Are you cold? Are you cold? Is it cold in here?” and being baffled by their negative responses, even from Serena who usually can be counted on in things like that, and then it began dawning on me that maybe my affirmations from the morning weren’t working so well and maybe this was why I was so tired and looking forward so much to Eric’s nap when I could just. lie. down.

By evening I had gone from cold to very very hot and even Nathaniel remarked on it, my hotness, and I could feel the heat pouring from my fingers, which felt as if they were on fire.

Worse, the head pains had begun. Random yet searing pains, the result of a myriad of red-hot icepicks jabbing repeatedly, ripped through my right temple at odd moments with no warning. (Later I began to wonder whether a brain-eating worm hadn’t been set loose inside my head somehow. In fact, I was convinced of it, if only from the randomness of the icepicks, which ranged from four to twenty seconds apart, that’s between six and fifteen times a minute, every minute, for hours. And hours. Days now, really. It still hasn’t gone away, though it has been dulled somewhat by judicious applications of Tylenol, which it is learning to scoff at, that worm.)

Still having faith in the affirmations, I went to bed at an embarrassingly early hour, expecting to awaken feeling much much better. And I did, for about 20 minutes, which was not long enough to get the children off to school so I could crash again, but I did my best, and even made omelets! What was I thinking!

So Monday was a blur. Eric came home midday and I spent the afternoon in bed with him nearby, singing or chortling about some private joke, and me periodically begging him for quiet, and when 4 pm came I was happy for the first time that the children were going with their dad for the night because I knew I could recover in that time.

This morning I had to go to the grocery store to pick up things I knew we needed since the children were coming back today, and I wandered the icy caverns of the store rather aimlessly but still managed to get what we needed, but why was it so cold in there? I had on twenty layers of wool and cashmere and everything, but still! so cold! Which told me I wasn’t recovered yet, but this afternoon I managed to make a pot of chicken noodle soup and care for Serena, sick again with yet another fever, and here I am! writing again! Which means I am getting over the malaise that has accompanied the other symptoms, because I really didn’t like that feeling of Not Caring About Anything.

UPDATE:  The Brain-Eating Ear Worm still burrows.  Gah.