On Friday I got a call from the school nurse.
These calls are not unusual; earlier last week I got a call from the substitute school nurse, telling me she was legally obligated to inform me that my child Charlotte had bumped her face on the playground, and while she had neither cried nor bled nor lost consciousness nor had any visible signs of injury, she had suffered a blow to the head and I needed to know this.
Friday’s call, however, was a bit shorter and to the point: “Will is in my office. He says his head and stomach ache, and his temperature is 99.6.” Those being the facts, I left work to go get him.
I brought him home and he slumped onto the couch, where he drooped fitfully all afternoon. He got to the table to eat, but then dragged off to his bedroom and dropped straight to sleep.
He seemed much better in the morning — so well that we proceeded with the usual Saturday routine, sending him off with his friends for an activity, inviting one of those friends back to the house when his mother’s car battery died and she needed to go replace it.
But by the time the friend left around 3:30, Will was exhausted. He rolled onto the couch and fell asleep almost immediately. And slept. And slept. Through dinner, through attempts to get him to sit up and drink, through us carrying him to bed. He woke up long enough to crawl into our bed in the wee hours, complaining that he felt awful, and he stretched his sweaty body out next to me, with his feverish head on my pillow, and went back to sleep. He slept, in the end, over 14 hours straight.
And so it continued – he was sweaty and fitful Sunday, and we kept him home Monday — and we learned that the friend who came to play on Saturday was diagnosed with strep throat Monday morning. Monday night, he seemed less feverish, but his cough was much worse, and he ate very little.
Today I kept him home again, and called the doctor. When they heard “Feels bad and strep exposure” they fit us right in — with the elfish little Czech doctor who likes to call me “Mama” in a thick accent. “Mama, I know you do not like to zee your little ones distressed, but…” And as I half expected, the rapid strep test was negative, and I got the “Yes, Mama, these colds, they can seem scary when it is your own little one, but you know? To me? He is not so sick, no.”
In other words, “Lady, its a cold.” Or, at least, a virus.
We picked up some hot soup for lunch, came home, he lounged some more, voluntarily crawled into our bed and napped for nearly 2 hours, got up, ate three bites of dinner, stayed awake for a chapter of The Hobbit, and went back to bed, coughing and hacking.
It may be “Just a virus, Mama,” but my boy is pretty darn sick.
