A pattern has settled over me as I, in turn, have settled into my 30s. The pattern is this: I get sick twice a year. It’s almost as if, with three children under age 5, my body senses that twice-yearly is all we can afford. But when it does happen, every body part that’s been keeping something back the past six months stops doing that. Free-for-all pain waves, tremors and fluids all let loose in a no-holds-barred tsunami of ill.
Recently, I got sick with mastitis. I don’t mind telling you that, not after having gone to urgent care and being made to announce that I had it, loudly, three times, to the receptionist and adjoining chock-full waiting area.
I didn’t feel annoyed with the receptionist that day. The truth is I was so happy to see her. I love how, in some doctor’s offices, even the people answering phones wear scrubs in an effort to give off an office-wide, reassuring “medical” vibe. My girl was chewing gum and listening, on her computer, to a mash-up of Ja Rule. Didn’t matter: the scrubs did it for me. They were so crisp. I felt better just walking through the door.
A shift has occurred in my life, from being someone who’s taken care of when she’s sick to being someone who provides the care, regardless of personal health. There’s really no time to be sick with three kids, even a mere two times a year. It’s just not in the job description. I don’t recall ever actually having agreed to the shift—it just snuck up on me when I was googly-eyed Googling what a placenta looks like. So now when anyone—anyone; Ja Rule would do in a pinch—expresses a sliver of concern for me when I’m not well, I go practically liquid with gratitude. The receptionist asked for my photo ID and proof of insurance. I was touched.
Since my getting sick has been decreasing in frequency, when it does happen I deny, deny, deny—then wig out and think it’s the end of times. On doctor’s visits, I have to impress on them that it doesn’t feel like just any old case of strep throat. It’s strep throat plus this one elbow that’s been itching like crazy. More pertinent information to note: It came on two days ago; my throat really, really hurts; and I had this one dream last night where I was drowning in egg yolk. Everything matters here. Leave no stone unturned. This is your shot at publication in a rare-diseases medical journal if you’d just focus.
Almost always, what actually happens is I’m prescribed a round of antibiotics and sent on my way. And it works, almost always, except for the one time it didn’t, and I totally lost it. Then I got prescribed a second round of antibiotics, convinced beyond all doubt they would never work either, and then they did and by the next week it was fine.
At my son’s school, there’s a mom whom I’m friendly with; our kids get along and we make the usual chitchat on the playground after pickup. Only recently did I learn she’s not stay-at-home like me, that she has a paid job on top of this insane business of childrearing. “So what do you do?” I asked her, and she told me she works in the ER, as a doctor.
Something previously steady went vaguely fluttery inside of me. “What kind of doctor?” I asked.
She looked at me funny. “ER,” she replied.
Right. I had known there were ER doctors—that “ER” was a specialty—only the knowledge slipped my mind the way you might forget how to read on a really scary standardized test. Immediately, I now knew this woman was out of my league. Could we talk? Was this allowed? As an ER doctor, it’s totally feasible she may be my doctor one day. I didn’t think we were supposed to be doing this.
The thing is, I like keeping my doctors on a pedestal. I want them to possess vast quantities of secret knowledge, so that if the worst ever happens and I get terribly sick, they will be there, holding the answers for me. I don’t want to know the answers myself. More specifically, I don’t want to know their limits. I am willing to grant my doctors superpowers, if they are willing, in turn, to share peeks of them with me, on a need-to-know basis, per their prescription pad.
If all this is making me sound like a hypochondriac, you can stop wondering because I already checked. A hypochondriac worries about her own health, whereas I’m too busy obsessing about my kids’. But the way I see it, you have to obsess about your kids’, because—little-known fact about kids—when they’re born they don’t know how to talk. Every weird rash, every line of snot down their face is a question mark. Every unexplained fever or crying fit, a potential ear infection. The ear infections are a biggie; we see a lot of those in my house. A neighbor told me her son got an inner ear infection the doctors couldn’t even see until an ENT finally was able to detect it with radar. She related this to me while I stood on her driveway, clucking in sympathy, and inwardly resenting her for teaching me that was a thing. “Great,” I thought, viciously. “So now I can look forward to that.”
The sickest I’ve ever been was the time I got appendicitis, which emptied out my insides along with my will to live. The symptoms were in equal parts unpleasant and unmysterious. “I’m no expert,” I remember having thought, “but this feels like what I would imagine appendicitis to feel like.” Incredibly, when I went to the doctor, she said I was not sick—not with anything that wouldn’t self-cure—and sent me home with a heating pad. Years later, I’ve come to terms with it, which is unlike me, but people make mistakes. What I can’t get over is that I believed her: Blinded, by pain, to all semblance of logic, I refused to seek a second opinion until I was all but bodily dumped into a car and whisked off to the Manassas ER. To do it over again, I wouldn’t wait so long, though also to do it over again, I’d have to text my son’s friend’s mom and check to make sure she’s not working.
My sister’s a doctor, and thusly, the superstar of our family. To my knowledge, no one begrudges her this. Nobody’s jealous of her. Instead, we all lay claim to her bragging rights, by proxy, and mention her lots in conversations with outsiders. At pediatrician appointments, I reassure them I know all about the chicken pox vaccine “because my sister’s an anesthesiologist.” It’s my attempted shorthand for “I’m no dummy when it comes to medicine,” and I follow it up asking for their opinion on that egg yolk dream.
The real bright side to getting sick, of course, is getting better, which sounds obvious but cannot be overstated. It’s like a really, really hot bath, plus high-grade chocolate, plus you’re somehow on the top of the first hill of a roller coaster, feasting on chocolate and taking a bath. I have a trick where I leave out the pill bottles I was prescribed to treat whatever thing I just got over. That way, whenever I see them, I can remind myself how god-awful everything was a mere 36 hours ago. It prolongs my gratitude an extra day or two before I inevitably dip back down into taking it all for granted.
Then four to six months pass. One of my kids starts to cough.
I summon him over. He sneezes, then sticks his thumb in my mouth. I think about Ja Rule, the ER and chocolate.
Then we hunker down and agree to get this thing over with.