Sick Day

I had this blog all planned out. I was going to write about Finley’s first Christmas and the past few weeks, which saw many great advancements in our little girl’s development. But in FinleyWorld, plans have a way of being re-worked – often on the fly.

One of the things you learn as a parent is how immune to most sicknesses you really are. I, for one, have taken only one sick day from work in the last fifteen years. I rarely get sick – knock on wood. I get the occasional cold or a queasy stomach now and again, but it’s never anything that knocks me completely out of commission. And if I do get a whammy of a flu or something, it usually hits me, ironically, on a day off or a weekend. But for the most part, I haven’t been really sick since I was a kid. And that’s because kids haven’t built up their immunity.

The great stat we read is that in the first year of daycare you can expect your child to have twelve colds and the parents to have six. That’s because when they’re not running around with a runny nose, they’re acting as carriers to whatever germ hops from one of their classmates to them. So, as a parent, you read the stats, you deal with the sniffles and the coughs and the mucus… And although it may be a bit icky at times, it’s perfectly normal. But that’s just a cold. I was not quite prepared for what happened tonight.

Finley is nearing 11 months and has had several colds that have passed to Momma and me and back again. For the most part, we see it coming. She has a little cough or her nose starts leaking. Then her little throat gets a frog and she sounds like a pug when she sleeps. She gets a bit cranky and even sneezes a little. Momma pulls out the Vicks® vaporizer and we stand by with tissue in hand. Pretty standard stuff. Of course, just when you think you have a handle on reading the signs of sickness, you get a call in the middle of the day… Like we did today.

It was just after noon when the daycare called me to say that “as a courtesy,” they were letting me know that Finley had a rough morning, refusing her food and coughing a whole bunch. They had taken her temperature and it read 99 degrees. At 100 and above, the parents are required to take the kids home. So, they were basically giving us a head’s up that we might have to come get her. They were laying her down for her afternoon nap and would check her temp again when she woke up. After discussing with the Momma, we decided that even if she didn’t reach 100, we’d pull her out of daycare early so she could at least be at home. I checked with the daycare about an hour later and they said she didn’t sleep very long, but was up and playing. No need to get her right away, but a few hours later I was at the daycare picking up a very sleepy little girl and taking her home.

She seemed pretty tired and a little cranky, which is not a surprise. Her nose was running like a faucet, which makes things even more miserable because when we wipe her nose, you’d think she was being tortured. This girl does not like to have her face messed with. We can’t wipe food off of her cheeks or go after a stray booger without a little drama. According to her, it’s the worst thing that has ever happened to her and after we’re done, the waterworks may have stopped, but she goes on cursing Momma and Poppa in her little baby language.

So, I manage to wipe some snot while she screams bloody murder, making her poor, tired little face look even redder and more tired. Momma comes home and helps clean her up a bit and we decide to see if she’ll have dinner and then maybe a bath will help clear her chest and make her feel a bit better.

She does her best to eat but is not quite up to her usual hungry self, Momma notices. Obviously something must be wrong if she’s not eating. And then the coughing begins.

At first I wonder if something is caught in her throat because it’s not your typical cough… it’s more of a hacking/gagging sound. I’m just about to get up to see if I need to administer the baby Heimlich when someone, somewhere turns on a power hose and the contents of my baby’s stomach come shooting out her mouth onto her tray.

And then again. And then a third time. I had heard that kids are masters of projectile vomiting, but you don’t believe it until you see it. And where did all of this come from? Her stomach is maybe the size of a large orange, but it just kept coming.

The thing is, we have all been there. We have all been sick like that. And for the most part, it’s the best thing you can do to start feeling better – get rid of whatever it is that’s making you feel bad. But after you finish you feel weak and shaky and you just want to collapse. This was the first time this little girl had ever gone through any of this and it was just SO sad.
Of course, the first reaction is to get her out of there and cleaned up. And as I’m unhooking her from the high chair, she’s beginning to cry and look at me like “What did I just do?” The poor thing. It was hard to keep the tears back.

But thank goodness for kids and their short-term memory. Once we got her into the bath, it was like it never happened. She was playing in the tub and splashing like it was a normal night. Wouldn’t it be nice to move on from tragedy like that? It’s still playing in my mind. I keep seeing her little face looking at me wondering what just happened.

So, tonight as we laid her down for bed, we gave her a little extra loving. She may get the long rest she deserves, but it will be hard for Momma and Poppa to sleep. And for all of us – the baby and the parents – this is just the beginning. This won’t be the last time she gets sick and this won’t be the last time we lose sleep over it. The only real good thing is that as she gets older, she’ll hopefully only have a few bouts of illness. And for us… well maybe we’ll learn to take turns worrying and try to plan who gets to stay awake each night. But we know what happens when you make plans.