Quarantine

Sick, sick, sick. Around and around, up and down, all one, two, three of us.

This week, I figured I had contracted the dreaded hinny, and had Toby call his fabulous physician sister to find out if it is possible to get the killer flu without a fever. "Oh, not only possible. Totally likely." Great.

Fatigued and unable to get a breath on Sunday night, I cooked myself in the hottest shower I could stand till the tank ran dry. We had only one humidifier in the house. While I longed for the steam in my room, the motherly instincts nagged at me to bestow that singular comfort on my wheezing child. Toby suggested we all sleep together. Maternal, perhaps. Masochist? No. I plugged the bubbling wonder into Eliot's room and sank, into my own too-dry flannel sheets. I figured I would survive the night, and anyway, Toby knows how to run a hot shower and call 911.

Now, another humidifier happier, the pain in my chest has moved downward and my fear of a 2am visit to urgent care has abated. Eliot, true to his nature, has only grown more demanding and unstoppable as I have grown sleepier. Toby has been a saint. The past few mornings, he has risen at the now 6:00 wakeup time (preschoolers don't understand the concept of Daylight Savings Time) to entertain our energizer bunny while I grump and languish in steamy splendor behind a latched door. My dear husband has donated his lunch hour to the cause, running Eliot ragged around the backyard, leaping into piles of leaves and returning endless, errant pop flies. I have slept.

Today, a nausea-inducing dizziness gave my brain, as well as my sense of balance, a free ride on the tilt-a-whirl anytime I stood. When Eliot finally woke up from his nap, I was still horizontal on the couch, as I had been when he'd gone down two hours earlier. I decided to forgo the wheedling call to my husband to save me. I could tough out the afternoon on the couch.

I directed Eliot to get his doctor kit, and he did a full workup, testing my blood pressure, temperature, and reflexes, and finding something in my ears that shouldn't be there. "A kitty," the wise doctor concluded. He applied a bandage and declared me healed. Then he combed and trimmed my hair with play-doh scissors, provided a rousing round of karaoke on his battery-operated tape microphone ("Look at this stuff! Isn't it neat!"), and played several versions of Candy Land on my stomach. Somehow, we made it through till Toby's late return from the trenches without me ever having to rise from the sofa or summon our pal, Walt Disney, to take over.

Dinner consisted, as all meals have for several days, of things like jarred baby food, cold turkey, and sliced apples. Even while I slept through both breakfast and lunch today, Toby managed to feed himself and Eliot relatively healthy things ("He ate his broccoli, sweetie!"), wash up the dishes, wipe noses, and arrange magnificently expensive car repairs with the mechanic.

Maybe the bathroom sink is unrecognizable under a layer of old washcloths and toothpaste scuzz, and perhaps I haven't returned a phonecall or written my daily pages or set foot in the Y in days, but Eliot ate his broccoli. No one in the house is running a fever of 102. And my kid is managing to play his way through this bout of illness as if it is just an awesome game his mommy and daddy have worked out just for him.