She has strep. We suspected as much this morning, when she woke up complaining about her throat. She seemed fine otherwise. She even finished the final six Valentine’s Day cards for her classmates. Melissa took her to the doctor, a trip that lasted an hour and a half. Then there was confusion over whether she should take the prescribed cephalosporin antibiotic, because we think she developed a rash a year ago when taking another antibiotic in the same family. That necessitated two trips to the CVS, leavened by one to the Super Fresh, where we acquired a sick-day treat: two kinds of jello, lime and, after much deliberation, grape.
In between there was some TV and some lethargically slurped chicken-noodle soup for lunch, during which she asserted, again, for her own benefit as much as mine, “I’ve been very healthy. I haven’t thrown up since I was two.” Then she tried to figure out what year that was, eventually settling on the right one, 2004.
The crash began after lunch, when I could see her face redenning and her eyes darkening. After taking the pink medicine, with a Benadryl chaser, we sat on the couch and I read a chapter of On the Banks of Plum Creek. (Grasshoppers ravage the wheat crop; Pa walks heads out on a couple-hundred-mile walk back East to find work picking crops.) Then she collapsed in a heap. She napped for three and a half hours, first on the couch, then in our bed, where I changed her into her jammie bottoms. (She’s got a little rash around her belly button.) I heard her stir and came downstairs to find her sitting upright, regenerated.
The revival was long enough for two small bowls of lime jello, a viewing of a Disney video (a medley of saccharine movie songs), a bit of mac and cheese and peas and corn, a second viewing of the Disney ad and a third bowl of jello. Then came the crash. Melissa carried her limp body upstairs. While I cleaned up, Chloe and Melissa did some secret project—another Valentine? she made three additional cards this morning that we are forbidden from turning over—and then she knew it was time for bed. After a gag reflex and tears, the medicine was diluted with chocolate syrup, a trick of which Melissa had reminded her. She didn’t want to floss. She didn’t want to do her mouthwash. She's still sick.“I didn’t play all day,” she announced.
But she desperately wants to go to school for the Valentine’s party tomorrow. I explained that the doctor said she had to wait 24 hours from her first dose of medicine before she could return, and that meant she couldn’t go until after lunch. There were tears for fear of being unable to attend. Then a second round of questioning on the reason for the day-long wait. Then self-assurance that she would be well enough to make it by afternoon. Then a promise from me to take her to the party, then to Scrabble club after school, then home.
“I want to sleep here all night,” the little fragile creature said in our bed, after a reading by mom of Stellina, a book about another fragile bird. She sighed a resigned “I love you, too,” to me and rolled over to sleep. Mother and daughter are lying there right now.
