What True Worry Really Is

I thought worrying about whether my necktie was lopsided in high school was serious. No. Forget that. Worrying about the health of your sick 10-month old baby is serious — about as serious as it gets. I feel like crap, because I wish I could do something more, something like cure him with the snap of my fingers. But all we can do is give him medication as appropriate, care for him as best we can, and help him fight through it.

He’s been running a fever since Wednesday night, which just so happens to be the day on which he received his last immunization (his second DTaP injection). In truth, this may have all started on Tuesday night, when he got a real lousy sleep, I think because he was experiencing some teething issues. But then Wednesday he started running a 103.5 degree fever, which is some serious shit, so we called the doctor and gave him some children’s ibuprofen liquid which seemed to help quite a bit. In fact he seemed to have a pretty good sleep after that.

On Thursday, though, he was still feverish — though down to 101.6 at this point. I went to work, but my wife reported that he was fairly listless all day and didn’t want to each much solid food (though he still enjoyed his bottles of formula). Then last (Thursday) night, he woke up at 4 a.m. crying and feverish again, so more ibuprofen was applied. I stayed home from work again and we took him to a Chinese herbalist this afternoon, the same woman who treated my wife during her pregnancy, so she is a trusted resource.

As a result of that visit, we’ve started giving our son Chinese herbal medicine, helping him drink more water and a bit of juice, and have been trying to cool him with cold washcloths. He did pretty well during the day today, but still looked exhausted much of the time. This evening his fever was 102.7, so again we made with the ibuprofen and put him to bed around six. He’s been sleeping pretty restlessly so far, waking up from time to time…not making too much noise about it, but probably not getting a real restful sleep either.

It’s about 9 o’clock now and we’re about to head to bed ourselves, as we’re both whipped. Plus we may have ourselves another 4 a.m. (or worse!) event tonight. Thankfully it’s the weekend so we don’t have to juggle work obligations as urgently, although of course, being the weekend, that also means clinical resources won’t be easily available should we need them. We hope we do not.

Although I spent a bit of time today trying to rustle up an iPhone 5 for myself at a local retail establishment, without any success, I told my wife that my one true wish is not a phone, but to wake up tomorrow and find Connor well and happy and smiling up at us from his crib, ready to go and start the day. Whatever is going on with him, I hope he finds the strength to overcome it soon. We’ll do the best that we can to help him.