In Sickness and In Health

There are a myriad of reasons I abhor having a sick child, specifically, my sick child.

I especially hate those times when they're not so sick as to not annoy you and be blissfully semiconscious in their bed in a feverish state, watching their favorite movie for the umpteenth time, but they are exhibiting too obviously the signs of sickness for any parent in good conscience to take them out in public, exposing other children, and consequently, those children's parents, to a possible future excruciating existence of being housebound with a restless and bored child. Ironically, children are most contagious before you even have a clue of what's in store for the next week or more, but we parents still do the polite thing of keeping our children quarantined well past the time of contagion to ease the sensibilities of healthy children's parents and give them the false security that they will not be subjected to this viral abyss.

Vaughn has been seriously sick for the last few days, starting with the stuffies on Friday, peaking with a fever and severe crankiness, and fading out with the sniffies and wet cough today. Unfortunately, it was Dave's days to watch him during the worst part of it, and I'm not saying unfortunately for him, but for me. On the days that I worked, Dave got the fading in and out of consciousness part of the sickness and (oh can it be true?) the truly miraculous development of laryngitis, of all things. It was pure bliss for about 2 days, where the loudest sound Vaughn could utter was a barely audible raspy squeak. It especially came in handy when he was whisper screaming a good part of Saturday night due to a combination of dropping a 10-pound weight on his foot and just the general crappiness he was feeling as a consequence of his illness.

Now lest I come off as a stone cold b---h, let me explain a critical characteristic of Vaughn's. He loathes (and I cannot use that word strongly enough) medicine in any form, fashion, consistency, viscosity, or viscidity. (This is one reason why I spent over $400 to have him knocked out to get his cavities filled--another story for another day.) When I posed this little problem to his pediatrician (and evidently I must have minimized it because she didn't seem to grasp the scope of the situation), she said putting medicine in chocolate syrup always works, and just kind of shrugged her shoulders like--"Yeah, so what? Kids don't like medicine. Everybody knows that," and so has been the general reaction when I have brought this up to other mothers. It's common knowledge kids don't like medicine, but you put up with the resistance, overcome it, and it's over and done. Ah, if only it could be that simple. Among other lamentable qualities my son has inherited from me is my acute sense of taste and smell. It doesn't matter how we disguise the medicine--chocolate syrup, lemonade, ice cream, crack--with the first sniff, he detects it, takes a lick or sip, and then looks at us suspiciously as we lamely try to explain that things just taste different when you're sick. He then refuses to eat, drink, or otherwise consume the fare, requesting something else and hypervigilantly supervising our food preparation from there on.

Now, you might say, "Why don't you just make him take it?" And I would reply, "Are you familiar with the saying you can take a horse to water but..." If you are, I don't need to finish, and if you're not, well, you've lived too sheltered of a life and I'm sorry to add to your confusion. We have wrestled him to the floor, sat on him, pried his mouth open, and poured the offending substance down his gullet, only to have him promptly and ferociously spew it back up, with now the offending substance (which was less than a teaspoon), within seconds multiplied to over a gallon of syrupy sticky liquid blanketing him, the floor, us, and the neighboring furniture and walls. We have cajoled, bribed, threatened, begged, pleaded, bargained, but instead, we end up with a child that is so sick he is screaming and moaning and begging us to help him, but refusing to allow us to put anything in him or on him or close to him that would actually ease his suffering. You can imagine how this makes for a very fun evening. Luckily, this time, his screams were muted by his laryngitis, but being a mother, I could still hear him.

So you see, I am not so sensitive that I'm above trying to mask my child's illness by drugging him and then subjecting him to unsuspecting victims. It's that I am unable to, and consequently, will be spending the rest of my day in this pathogenic limbo, until Vaughn has the appearance of being healthy enough to go back to school--sans medication.