Talk about strong opinions! I’m not referring to politics or religion. No, something more heated than that: what to do with a sick kid.
You could’ve warned me. I have after all, invited you along on my launch into motherhood, having married a now formerly single dad last summer.
The assault of opinions on what I should be doing for my new daughter began a couple weeks ago with my own mother.
“Have you gotten everyone flu shots?” she wanted to know with great urgency.
The simple answer was, “No.”
“Oh, Daryn!” my mother chastised me as if I hadn’t done my homework. “Why not?”
“Well, for one, I’ve never gotten a flu shot,” I explained. “And this is a marriage thing. I could get one or not, but your new son-in-law doesn’t believe in them and he cares more about this issue than I do, so he wins. No flu shots.”
Of course, this all came back to bite me last week when my eighth-grader came back from a weekend retreat moaning, “I don’t feel very good.” By 7 p.m. she was running a 99.8 temperature, had a headache and stomach ache. My husband had just left on a business trip, so that put me in charge of my first Mommy medical crisis.
“No school for you tomorrow, young lady,” I declared. I was popular for about 30 seconds until I shared the other breaking news: “Our Internet, phone and cable TV are out. Cable guy won’t be here for 24 hours.”
My daughter’s eyes widened with horror, as if our multimedia’s near terminal report had been her own diagnosis. “What am I supposed to do all day?!” she bemoaned.
My suggestion to read a real book didn’t go over so well.
My husband phoned and insisted, “You need to call the pediatrician.”
I wanted to argue about that seeming a little overly aggressive and that I thought I was handling it just fine, but I thought better of it.
In the interest of marital harmony and covering my new mommy bases, I called the doctor’s office and got a nurse practitioner who sounded about the same age as my daughter. “What are the symptoms?” she asked.
“She has a fever of 99.8,” I started.
“OK, first of all,” Nurse Kiddo interrupted me, “it’s not a fever if it’s not over 100.1.”
Seriously? It’s now politically incorrect to call a temperature over 98.7 a fever? Who knew?
The nurse did agree that I was handling things well. No need to bring my daughter in.
That is, until the text from the mother of another child who was on the same retreat. “I’m taking Brittany to the pediatrician for strep test and chest X-rays. How about you?”
Clearly, I did not rate keeping my kid at home. “Get dressed,” I told my daughter. “We’re going to the doctor.”
Of course, they looked at me like I was an overreacting Nervous Nellie as my daughter described her symptoms and they made her gag sticking things down her throat.
One negative step test, one co-pay and a lollipop later we were out the door with instructions to keep doing exactly what I had been doing: giving my daughter rest, fluids, Tylenol and the best meds of all, some good old-fashioned pampering and TLC.
Happy to report, Daughter is back in school. She does sound like a 90-year-old French truck driver who smokes three packs of cigarettes a day, but the other symptoms are gone. We have survived.
Now, please, just don’t tell my mother.
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