when you put your arms around me, i get a fever that’s so hard to bear
1. fever isn’t such a
new thing
When I had my one-on-one consultation with Dani at
Sirenland, I debated out loud whether it made sense to end my memoir with a
celebratory chapter about Dash’s birth.
“It’s a book about learning to live with uncertainty, and I
don’t want to wrap it up too neatly. I think there should still be some
uncertainty.”
She answered more as a parent than as a writer. “Oh, there’s
still plenty of uncertainty.”
After B and I broke up, I tried to nail my world down, even
as I let it open up. I asked my landlord for bars on my windows, even though I
lived on the second floor. He told me to give it a few months. It was like he
knew.
Then I met AK and fell in love. The little storytelling voice
inside me said, This is your happy
ending. Two bad things happened to you: Your mom died and B broke up with you.
But now you finally get to live happily ever after.
I was twenty-eight.
Pop off in case of fire. |
I wrote a prose poem about the world cracking and becoming
fragile again and posted it on my blog. I just spent a long time looking for it
and didn’t find it. Apparently I’ve been blogging for almost ten years. I found
entries about neighbors I don’t even remember and posts in which I
over-enthused about dinners with friends who weren’t that great. I think
that’s how I used to blog: OMG, you know
what’s awesome?? Everything!! I thought that was what blogging was. Maybe
that was what blogging was in 2006. Maybe I was just more aspirational in
general. Now people have Pinterest for that.
2. fever with thy
flaming youth
I don’t know if you can have a honeymoon phase with someone
who poops on you semi-regularly, but you can definitely fall in love with that
little pooper. And when you’re in love, you feel protected. You’re in a bubble,
and you believe it’s made of something more durable than soap. Something thick
and clear and safe, like whatever dental dams are made of.
Jamie gifted us with a bag of baby-related odds and ends,
the stuff no one would think to put on a registry. Gas drops. Diaper cream. A
thing that sucks snot out of little noses. Infant Tylenol. I looked at the
medicine shelf of our changing table and thought that those things were for other babies.
"We been hawkin' headlines, but we're makin' 'em today!" |
His temperature was 103. My adrenaline started pumping, my
own heat rising. It’s okay. Babies get
sick and then they get better, I told myself. My body told me, No, no…remember? Bad things happen to us. Heartbeats
stop. Cancers grow.
I called the nurse line on the back of my insurance card.
They asked me if he had a bunch of symptoms that he didn’t have, which I hoped
was a good sign. He was not listless. He was not having difficulty breathing,
although sometimes he breathed kind of loudly. His fontanel was not pulsing in
a weird way.
But he was under three months old, and when babies are so young, all roads lead to the emergency room. AK Googled some
things. “It sounds like spinal taps are pretty standard at his age.”
The only Spinal Tap I'd be excited to encounter. |
By then it was early Easter morning. Huntington Hospital was
empty except for one sleeping homeless man. They ushered us in and squirted
infant Tylenol into Dash’s mouth while they took his vitals. The nurses were
friendly and attentive. I tried to read their faces. Were they too attentive?
Soon his fever came down and he started smiling again. There
was my Dashaboo! A parade of doctors and nurses and techs came in. Off the
record, said one young doctor, I don’t think he has meningitis, which is the
thing we’d be most worried about. So maybe no spinal tap.
My heart stopped racing and slowed to a jog. They did a
urine test and a blood test and a chest X-ray. So many new things in his
day—his first taste of something that wasn’t Similac or Generic Brand Similac,
his first needles, his first cancer-causing rays.
Usually I’m terrified of medical results but blasé about
medical treatments. I can take the pain, just tell me I’m going to live. But
Dash couldn’t console himself that way, and I hated watching him suffer. I almost
wondered if some part of me that had immunized myself against blood draws and
cold stethoscopes and surgery had finally released a floodgate and admitted that
discomfort was, yes, uncomfortable.
They told us it looked like he had a virus. Apparently this
was a good thing. They gave him an antibiotic shot in the leg just in case. We came
home mid-day and missed Easter with our families. There were a million things
we needed to do, but instead we just huddled together, shaken and grateful.
3. sun lights up the
daytime, moon lights up the night
A few days later, the results of Dash’s urine culture came
back positive for bacteria. The mild virus was just a coincidence. The fever
had actually been caused by a UTI,
which could have been caused by something as simple as poop getting where it
shouldn’t or as serious as a mis-wiring of his plumbing.
The latter would probably be fixable with relatively mild
surgery, and the part of me that had learned not to catastrophize could handle
this information. Things were fixable. We weren’t out of the game. His
pediatrician ordered some tests, which we’ll be doing in a week or so.
Another part of me felt like, Of course. Of course your child, Cheryl, will be less than three months
old when his first medical saga begins, because this is your destiny, now
handed down to a child who doesn’t even share your genes. It didn’t feel so
much like a curse as a job. My job was to go to a million doctor appointments
and take pages and pages of notes, and in exchange, my child and I would get to
live.
Stay with me. |
4. never know how
much i love you
It’s been kind of a stressful couple of weeks. It’s hard to
work part-time at a fulltime job; everyone has this fantasy that you’ll use
your minimal hours to do their thing.
It’s hard to have almost zero downtime. It’s hard to find daycare. It’s hard to
fail constantly in all realms and immediately pick yourself back up because you
have to, because you signed up for this and you know it’s the only way to grow.
Nutty guy with a UTI. |
I signed up for the problems I have right now, and I think
these are the good times. Happy, even, if not an ending. Hopefully not an ending, right?
*Quick review (contains spoilers!): Stories about poor
people uniting against the man (Les Mis, etc.)
usually make for good musicals. And Cathy and I hearted the 1992 Disney movie Newsies, based on the true story of a newsboy
uprising in Jacob Riis-era New York, so much. But then Disney went and
Disney-ized it even more for the stage version. In the movie, the fellas rise
up against Joseph Pullitzer and win, meaning that he isn’t successful in
raising the wholesale price of the papers they sell for a penny.
But apparently the triumph of the proletariat is just too
dull for Disney, so in this version, the lead newsboy lands Pullitzer’s
daughter and gets a job as an illustrator at the World, the same paper against which he just launched a strike.
Disney’s message: Everyone being able to feed themselves is not a happy enough
ending. You have to join the elite by means of a fluke talent. They might as well
have had him become an NBA player.
Say what you will about Rent’s
Vaseline-lensed take on 1980s New York (another musical with an uprising and a
song about escaping to Santa Fe), but at least none of the characters gets
rich. At least, twenty years into its run, it is still the vision of one guy,
not the product of a corporation’s Not So Secret Committee On Maintaining The Capitalist
Status Quo.
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