Izzy:(into cell phone) Hello Emily. Yes I am STILL here. No...no...yes but...wait a minute. (to doll) Shh honey it's O.k. I'm here. Yes Emily. Can you hear that? She's been sick and crying all day. It was funny at first but now it's just annoying and old. Wait just a minute. (to doll) Shut up baby! Mommy's on the phone...
There is a cold or flu that is cutting a wide swath through the region and naturally Izzy and the Boy both have been struck down by it. At the risk of sounding like a calloused jerk, I hate sick kids. I don't mean sick kids make me angry, though they might a little bit. (selfish little buggers) No what I mean is it is the one time that all kids want is to feel better and that is precisely thing you can't do for them. You can get them soup or ginger-ale and kinder eggs and you can let them watch all the T.V. they can handle and let them not eat if they don't feel like it but in the end you are powerless against it and have to let it run it's course.
They both have been running fairly high fevers, the Boy especially. If high fevers were an Olympic event, the Boy would be a gold medalist many times over. 103-105 is not an uncommon number for him and it's been like that pretty much his whole life. Now the fun part, if you can call it fun, is when he is in the grips of a fever like that, his brain tends to go for a walk and take his body along for the ride. When Mrs. Narrator first told me about it, I thought she was pulling my leg...
I remember one time in particular that we had all gone downstairs to get him medicine to try and bring his fever down. A bottle of aspirin got knocked over and immediately the boy dove for it and began to shift the pills around like a chicken scratching at feed corn.
"Just leave them buddy," I said.
"I have to pick them up, Sid," he said in an agitated voice. "I have to pick them up or the robots will get them and then what will we do?"
"What robots?"
"The ones that are in my room, floating above my bed...just waiting..."It was an odious warning and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing.
It's not that he's sleep walking but he's not quite awake or in control of all his faculties either. We have heard about the robots and mice in the walls and the mysterious and sinister Third Brain (my personal favourite). This time around he is seeing numbers on peoples faces, glowing red numbers. Isn't there a music video with someone who sees numbers above peoples heads? Maybe my number is up.
Isobel is a standard sick girl. Fevers without the trippy dreams, nodding off on the toilet seat, snotty noses and shiny sleeves.(I used to know people that paid money to act the same way) Her voice drops at least four octaves and when in full grips of the bug, she sounds a little like Lucille Ball. I half expect her to walk around the house swilling whiskey and bar
king "God-damn it Ricky that was supposed to be my close up." A father can dream.We knew she was feeling better when her appetite returned along with her sense of humour.
She had just finished her lunch (all of it which in and of itself is a rarity ) and was laying on the sofa. Fully clothed except her pyjama bottoms were pulled down just enough for her bum to be sticking out, completely.
"Izzy your pants are falling down." I said.
She looked down at the front of her pyjama bottoms. "No they aren't Daddy, see?"
"They're falling down at the back, your butt is hanging out."
"Well," she began. "My head isn't feeling hot anymore from being sick but my bum is still kinda sick so I need to cool it off."
I have never done well with vomit. I am not afraid of it nor repulsed by it. But just the same, I wouldn't want to put on my wellies and go slopping about in it either. No my issue with vomit is that it comes generally without warning and that it awakens something primitive in my brain and all reason goes out the window with it. I could stand next to someone with a sucking chest wound and remain quite calm and sensible and generally be of some type of use. But when the gastric-torpedoes start to fly, instinct kicks in and I must flee. Not alone mind you, oh no. My brain will actually tell me to grab who or whatever is doing the vomiting and flee!
I remember coming home from a New Years party after far too much to drink. Feeling quite ill and knowing full well that spew was in the mail, did I throw up in the cab? No. In the street where it would mix harmlessly with the snow and be taken away by cars? No. No, I had to run toward the bathroom that was down in the basement behind two locked doors in my house. I left a trail from the road to the side door.
Now Isobel's stomach and I are already mortal enemies as became evident in Mexico, so when Izzy had a bit of a stomach thing a while back, we had a bowl at the ready and Mrs. Narrator was set to go off to roller derby. As I said before, vomit comes with no warning. Izzy had been eating a little and her spirits had generally improved but we knew she wasn't quite a hundred percent when she laid down for a nap mid afternoon.
She calmly sat up, opened her mouth and let fly a stream of second hand soup a hundred and twenty feet across the living room rug. Did I reach calmly for the bowl that sat mere inches beneath my bilious daughter? No, I picked her up and ran toward the bathroom.
"Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!" I muttered while carrying her.
"Daddy, I'm sick" she gurgled as we ran. The trail stretched from the living room to the bathroom and over most of the bathroom floor. In fact, I`m not entirely certain if any vomit actually made it into the toilet. She was covered and I was was covered and the bathroom and living room floors were both covered. Mrs. Narrator screeched that I should be ashamed of myself and maybe I should have but it seemed perfectly reasonable to trot across the living room with a child who had become a kind bile fountain...it did at the time anyway.
And I have done the same with the cats too. Pick them up and run like a bastard toward the back door an
d wonder why there is never any puke outside when I let them back in... I remember a while back when Izzy had informed us that a certain word had entered her vocabulary, she noted "Daddy, I don't like this carpet anymore. It smells like shit." but does compounding the problem give you the right to complain?
No comments:
Post a Comment