Fever All Through the Night

It has been a week of viral happenings at Chez Shirty, let me tell you. I got a call on my cell phone Monday morning at around 9:30, informing me that The Boy had barfed on the school bus just as his class was pulling into the parking lot of their field trip destination. I knew I shouldn’t have let him go to school, because he felt a little warm and didn’t look right in the morning, but he wanted to go so badly and kept insisting he felt fine . . . thankfully he didn’t barf on anyone. And he was sitting way in the front of the bus, so everyone else got to use the emergency exit in the back, which amused and excited him even in his compromised state.

I got him home and into clean pajamas and bed, where he slept for a little while and woke in a panic, thinking he’d slept through to the next day and missed Monday Night Football (even with a raging fever, The Boy has priorities). And boy, did the fever rage, up to about 103-degrees (not all that dreadful, I know, but anything over 102 makes me nervous). I spent the next several days doing the Advil/Tylenol tag team, wiping him down with cool wash cloths, reminding him to drink more water, coating him with Vicks to ease his cough, and generally fussing and fretting and babying him.

We watched the Weather Channel (which he finds soothing), read, listened to the classical radio station (he has a crush on his music teacher), watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (one of his favorite RiffTrax offerings) and Edward Scissorhands (do you know that I’d forgotten Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder were a couple?!?), and dozed. He’s never been sick for this long, and he absolutely never been so still for so ling.

He’s back at school today, finally, because the fever is gone, but he looks like a heroin addict. He has a soccer game after school in which he is not playing, and a dance tonight that I am betting he won’t feel like going to. In fact, I’ll be surprised if he makes it through the school day.

And how am I? Tired, lightly feverish, and utterly unable to eat. And I have a bonus breakout of pimples, the likes of which I haven’t seen since high school. My house is a disaster (not to mention filled with noxious germs), I have laundry piled to the ceiling, I’m out of library books and won’t be able to go until tomorrow at the earliest, and my knitting project isn’t working.

The end of this day—and this week—can’t come soon enough.