Under the weather

Last week I left the bedroom to check on the girls after hearing one of them on the monitor and returned to Didier shivering, wrapped in a sweater and all the blankets on the bed pulled up to his neck.  He was burning with fever and asked for even more cover from the chill.  He had pain in the lymph nodes in his neck and seemed a bit crazy, like insane, to me.  Dengue fever.  After watching him take some Tylenol and drink lots of water, I took my pillow from the bed and told him I would sleep with the girls.   I checked on him twice that night to make sure he was OK, well, alive actually.  I had never thought of losing him, but the way he looked and the way he was acting, I felt a tear in my heart.  I just wasn't sure.


I slept very little that night as I worried about him and was kicked and nuzzled, first by Virginie and then Lily, each in her little bed calling or crying for me, sensing my presence in the room.  Even though the weaning had begun the previous evening, I couldn't bear to drop off the screaming puppy in the bed with a boiling cuckoo nut, even if it was her father.  So Virginie nursed heartily and snuggled on me while I was with her, and then I moved over to Lily's bed when she asked me to be with her.  A lot of back and forth.  And checking.

Two days later, Didier felt better and Lily came down with a vicious cold most likely caught by one of her classmates.  She stayed home with us for two days playing like it wasn't just her job, but that she was on the Amazing Race or something and could score some points for some of the reckless craziness. Then she would pass out at night and snore, hack up a lung, sneeze, basically convince me that she was surely not ready to return to her formal education.  I sat up with her too, listening to her breath, adjusting her position, carrying her to the bathroom since I thought the medication might prevent her from getting up on her own to go.  On the first night when Lily coughed out loud and nearly shook the girls' room, Virginie woke up and said, "Mimmy no night night.  Hi."  I feared that our morning was about to begin at 3:30 am, but she was just acknowledging her sick big sister.  Sending her the purest love by thinking of her, considering her.

Now the sick torch has been passed to Virginie.  The poor boo boo is coughing and has mucus caking her little nostrils, but she still refuses to take medicine or be aspirated without an unfair wrestling match of Mommy and Papa versus la Petite.  How she manages to evade two grown adults for so long is something to behold.  She shakes her head and writhes around on the floor once caught.  I feel awful waiting for Didier to finally pin her down, arms and legs finally still under his weight so I can give her the medicine or free her nasal passages.  You'd think we were going to torture the poor thing.

Ever since the kidney stone put me on the floor of our bathroom in a pain reminiscent of unmedicate, immediate childbirth, something I had experienced already, thank you very much, I have thought more and more about my life and how I live it.  I always hated being sick and often felt like I had done something bad or wrong to be felled by whatever ailed me.  But I can see that sometimes we get sick because we need to slow it all down.  Regroup.  Recuperate.  Check in with ourselves and take stock.  Now the girls, well they get sick because they are with little germ generators all day long.  It would take daily Hazmat wear to prevent them from bringing the stuff home.  But Didier and I, we know better.  It was time to slow down.  So we are.  All together.  Medication time is at 6:30.


(c) Copyright 2010.  City Mom in the Jungle.