Mid-last week, when all of our kids were sick or on the perilous rockslide toward illness, my husband started hacking up a lung. It reminded me of the type of cough you hear from behind you on a Greyhound and you wonder, how in the world is this person not dead? You don’t even worry about catching it as its horrible humidity mists you between the seat cracks. You can’t catch a lifetime of whatever that person has been through.
Nick’s bus-cough was probably something that he caught from our kids, or his “kids”, his students. There’s no more charitable way to frame this so I will just come out and say that every time he coughed, I felt a flash of anger. Jane already had an RSV diagnosis and Desi had trudged through some viral thing and was back at school, only to come home early Friday howling about his ears. Ears?? The ear pain thing barely registered for me, I did not have the bandwidth to be curious about ears. Friday, I all but demanded Nick go to the ER. Friday night, he made an appointment for himself for the following morning at the closest Urgent Care place, which is a 35-minute drive.
I live in a rural area. I find myself saying that a lot, mostly because my support system is based in urban or suburban areas and I have to translate my experience. Here are things I cannot do in my town: use a ride-hailing app, use a food takeout delivery app, access “ethnic” food that isn’t Mexican, Thai, Indian, or Chinese unless I cook it myself, use an app to hire a babysitter, go to a corporate boutique fitness franchise, use an app to have someone grocery shop for me and then put the groceries in the back of my car, use an app to buy groceries from Amazon and deliver them to my door, use an app to hire someone to build my IKEA furniture, use an app to hire someone to mount my television, use an app to rent an electric scooter, go to a place and throw axes into a wall, go to a place to float alone in a dark tank of saltwater, go to a fast-casual restaurant where everything is brass fixtures and white tile and you tell a gloved worker what to put in a bowl for you, use an app to send a massage therapist to my house to massage me, go to a bar filled with ancient arcade machines, go to a brewery that is also for children for some reason, go to a bar with duckpin bowling, do yoga with any animals that aren’t other people. Go to Target, go to Whole Foods, go to Urgent Care.
I just looked up our old Columbus address and found about ten Urgent Care centers within a three-mile radius. I would have had to choose which one to go to, check their hours, wonder which one would have the worst lines, which one would force me to contend with the worst traffic, which one had we already been to so that they could have our info pulled up with two keystrokes i.e. which one would prevent me from having to fish my insurance card out of my brick-like mom-wallet out of my enormous mom-bag, while balancing a baby on my hip. Which is the one who had the guy working there who offended me that one time? Which is the one closest to the strip mall Mexican ice cream shop where there is a chest of one hundred different types of paletas, as visually satisfying as a new 64-count box of crayons, where we could grab a sick day treat in the 25 minutes between leaving the Urgent Care and the Walgreen’s across the street having our new prescription filled?
That was what our old life was like. A year ago, I would have said that that was better. Now I would say that it’s different. Now we get in the car and drive from “mid-shore,” where we live, to the island between our peninsula and the western shore of Maryland, where there is a CVS Minute Clinic. There are no micro-decisions, no flow chart to follow. It’s mentally quiet, the way a minimally merchandised boutique is mentally quiet. But I wouldn’t mind a paleta.
Nick came back from the island Saturday morning testing positive for flu and pneumonia. I felt a panic rise up, then get instantly snuffed out by the relief of knowing exactly what the next few days would be like. We would all be indoors, following a medication schedule, listening to the Octonauts ‘creature report’ song play one hundred times, trying to survive.
I did not have to consider are we going to the farmer’s market is it warm enough to walk or should we drive are we going to the kid’s art place that’s open on Saturdays should we go out to the wood-fired pizza place so I can get a beer and look at some walls that I don’t personally owe to the bank, should we order pizza in, should we make a bullshit pantry meal to be frugal, it’s kind of warm I should clean out the car, I should cull the clothes from Jane’s drawers that don’t fit, I should go for a run, we should do our taxes, we should figure out if we can afford to go on vacation this summer, we should check in with Nick’s dad, we should see if the Habitat Restore place has any dishwashers, we should get Desi new shoes.
It was no longer a day of choices. I had cabin fever, sure, but I also enjoy the sensation of giving up.
Jane, who was supposed to be almost well again, spiked a frightening fever on Sunday night. We gave her Tylenol but it didn’t seem to have any effect, she stayed boiling hot and listless. I have an animal fear of high fever, something probably stamped into my DNA. I felt a soft knell of clarity, an understanding of what my night was going to be like. I would not be doing dishes and bathtime and diving into the infinite scroll of my phone. Nick had flu and pneumonia so it would be me who would be taking Jane to the emergency room.
Emergency room visit, now that’s a real mom-drag occasion! Like going to a children’s holiday concert or something where you briefly zoom out on yourself and think, lol total mom. This being our first ER visit in 4.5 years on the job somehow, I thought of my parent friends’ experiences of pediatric emergency rooms: hours in the waiting room while other people’s kids cough directly into your mouth, running out of snacks, minutes dragging by, your kid licking all the magazines that have been sprayed with tuberculosis droplets, the DMV except for your body.
I rushed between rooms sticking things in a tote bag. The energy of flapping around the house doing admin in service of a big thing too obvious and scary to name: it reminded me of being in labor. Assembling a hospital bag even though you were supposed to have already assembled it, having to consider things like whether to pack an apple or a hair tie as though any of it really mattered.
There is a hospital in town, amazingly, though they keep trying to close it because this country wants rural people to die. I parked directly next to the emergency room and walked in, only to find it mostly empty. There was one woman in the waiting area, red-faced, crying, and I assumed she was waiting on someone else rather than waiting herself to be seen.
Oh yeah, I thought. This is not the peds ER at NCH in Columbus.
They called us in immediately to triage. Jane’s temperature was even higher than it had been at home. They got to swabbing, up the nose, down the throat. A chest x-ray using a medieval as shit device which I would suggest you find a way to avoid unless you want to know what your baby would look like wedged inside a Vitamix and restrained with an actual leather strap! After the excitement, it was time to just be together in the room as we waited to hear back. I kicked my shoes off, eased into the semi-reclined hospital bed, snuggled up under my 22-lb heated thunder jacket, and read my book as she breathed her ragged, desperate breaths.
There’s an old ThunderAnt sketch, or maybe it was on Portlandia, where Fred and Carrie volley earnest appreciation for their experience back and forth forever, saying “This is nice.” This is nice, I thought, reading a book that felt like it was written just for me. This is nice, admiring the way the fat deposits on Jane’s arms make her look jacked, the gold ringlets that grow only from the nape of her neck.
Three days before I had Desi, I was already 40 weeks and some days pregnant but my cervix was “like a closed fist” according to my OB. No dilation, no effacement, nada. I’d been pretty casual about monitoring “kick counts”, the third trimester instruction to pregnant women to take time every day to make sure there is adequate fetal movement within a certain time frame.
I went to do my kick count, and nothing. I lied down, like they tell you to do. I drank icy cold orange juice to stimulate the baby. Nothing. Thirty minutes. An hour. I let out a sound that was like the howl of a wolf drowning in mucus.
At labor and delivery, they put the monitor on my belly and we heard the reassuring fetal heart tones. He was alive. We waited in a dingy triage room for further instructions, holding hands, surrounded by menacing black and white posters about SIDS risk, Desi’s fetal heartbeat thumping away. “This is nice,” Nick said earnestly, which made me laugh. It was not nice, but I knew what he meant.
Jane and I got home from the ER around 10 p.m. on Sunday night and crashed hard. The next day, I went to do the weekly grocery run which had been delayed by all of our competing illnesses. There was an ad for Instacart displayed over the grocery cart corral, available now!, and it struck me as the strangest thing. Who in this town needs Instacart?! I never feel like I’m trying to claw back time for myself here, even with the kids, with our jobs, with the looming promise of illness and weather and school closure and a major household appliance breaking.
I pushed the cart around the store slowly with a podcast in my ear, considering the produce as though stoned, as though at an art museum. This is nice.
Paletas with baby Desi, 2016.
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yr mate,
Evie
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