Children carry diseases.Don't get me wrong. I love my little guy. But here lately, I might as well be living in the biohazard bin at a hospital eating dirty Kleenexes and drinking the latent spittle found in the mouthpieces of public telephones.
For his four month birthday, we took G-Man to get his shots, because that's what you do when you care about your child. I appreciate that some people don't, and that's fine. Just don't come crying to me when your kid shows up with measles and polio and tuberculosis. If you can't afford it, try your local health department. If you're hiding behind religious conviction, God wants you to live. Consider where we'd be if wheels went against God. Or fried chicken, for that matter. Or lobster.
Oh. Wait.
And if you're basing your decision not to immunize on that fraudulent research report linking vaccines to autism, then wake the fuck up. That's been disproved. Go ahead and discount the "conspiracy theorists" on the "Interwebs" too.
Anyhow, enough of my rant. We got him his shots, and he kinda felt puny after that. No big surprise, because he just got shot full of dead viruses. We took him home, he kinda got over it, and then we went back to school the next day.
However, after we got home the next day, it was clear G-Man felt terrible. We couldn't quite put our finger on it, but his cheeks flushed and he moped around lethargically bursting into tears for apparently no reason. It kinda looked like he was catching puberty for a second. Later that night, I got up to feed him at 3 a.m. Afterward I changed his diaper, and then put him in his crib while I picked up the dirty diaper to throw it away.
That's when I noticed his face.
I don't know how to describe it, but it clearly stated "I feel violently sick." I grabbed the burp cloth, and at about six inches from his mouth, a stream of freshly digested formula hit the fabric, then turned downward to coat his face.He looked like "Carrie," but with Similac instead of pig's blood.
He stared at me. Shocked. Eyes stinging and lungs filling with air for one tremendous yowl. I scooped him up and sat him in the sink with his pajamas on and started the water, wiping and washing away the milk. It was all I could do.
This was the start of a cold, which morphed into a virus that turned into a stomach bug which turned into a cough which is now returning as a vomit-fest and underneath it all, we've got constipation and green rock turds that pear juice, extra water and Karo syrup just can't seem to fix.
Each time he gets sick, one of us gets sick, too. But not really sick. Just annoying sick. It's kind of like getting the sampler platter of sickness where you get to try out all the different flavors, but never really commit. So, yay. That's where we are at. I woke up with a sampling of his cough from ticklish throat and a splitting headache this morning.
If someone knows how to break the illness feedback loop we've gotten ourselves into, I'm all for entertaining ideas. And yes, we are washing our hands after we pee and not picking our nose very much.
