Just Another Day in the Infirmary

Yes, yes, we're still here.  Quite present, really.  I'm going to give you a quiz.  Is Oliver:

1) Sick.

2) Not sick.

Ding ding ding, you win!  Oliver does not.  He is sick, though you can't tell 50% of the time.

It started with a couple of wakeful nights.  I came home from a late dinner on Saturday to the upstairs wails of our child. 

"How long has he been screaming?" I asked Michael.  He looked at his Blackberry.

"Forty minutes."

We sat down at the table, screams in the backdrop, and found ourselves back to where we were around, oh, 9 months of age or so.  How do we know he's not hurt?  How do we know, after the inital check, that he hasn't gotten so mad that he has hit his head on the wall, wedged his pudgy thighs between the crib rails, had a nosebleed, thrown up....thrown up.... a cough cough  snapped us out of our worried musings, and Michael bolted upstairs.

He had thrown up.  We fell into our well-rehearsed you-pick-up-the-kid-I'll-run-the-bathwater-then-you-give-the-bath-while-I-change-the-sheets routine.  We did some version of that routine several times that night, and I slept next to my baby (the little one).  I felt so bad for my little guy, who was retching so badly you'd think he'd gone on a bender.  I lay awake, stroking his back, smelling his shampooey hair, kissing his sweet head a million times over, and thinking of his early days when we slept next to each other like this almost every day.  I miss it.

Vomiting turned into runny nose the next day,  which turned into a goobery eye (let's leave it at that), and some fevers, which led into a sick day on Monday.  I took him into the clinic, expecting eye drops for a bacterial infection.  I had done my homework, and I'm a pediatric nurse, which sometimes means I know what's going on.  Sometimes.  But not today.

"This one looks terrible," our doc said, looking in Oliver's left ear.

I nodded.  Then, "What?  Terrible as in infected?"

"Very infected, very infected. And this one," she said into his right ear, "is full of fluid."

How did I miss that?  Not that I have an otoscope at home to look in his ears, and not that I'd know what I'm looking at if I did, but ear tugging?  Severe crabbiness?  Head-grabbing?  He didn't have any of that.  Poor kid.  I can't believe I missed that.

The good news is that the antibiotic for his ears will cover anything that's going on with his eye, so we don't need to go down the eye drop road.  I expect that we'd need to call in for the reinforcement of several more grown adults to hold Oliver down for a dropper aimed at his eye. I'm already his favorite person for taking the bulb syringe and sucking rivers of snot from his nose. 

Somehow, I'm still okay with Oliver being out and about in public, even though he's a magnet for every bug currently floating around.  Who am I to nix Chucky Cheese, the pet store, and the library?  Or Culvers...today we went to Culvers because we were both crabby, and there's not much that frozen custard can't make better. 

"Oliver, let's clean your hands," I said, taking out a Wet Wipe.  Hey, I"ll take the kid out, but I am going to sanitize every surface within a five-foot radius. He held his hands out like a pro, and after I wiped them, I wiped the table.  He smiled and imitated my back-and-forth motions with the wipe.  "Can you help?" I held the wipe out to Oliver who smiled, and eagerly put the wipe in his mouth.

"Oliver!  That's a good way to get sick -  "

Oh.