My pediatrician warned me, but I didn’t listen.  At 17 months old, Harry has managed to escape all the childhood maladies in the baby books that I prepared myself for.   He has never had a stomach bug, never thrown up, never had diarrhea.  He has had a cold or two, but he truly has never even run a fever.  I was told daycare would change all that, and I nodded sagely, and promptly let it pass out of my consciousness stream.

I had NO IDEA, folks.  Holy crap.

Within five days of starting daycare, Harry developed a raging sinus infection. 

On the same weekend that his Daddy took a trip home to Jackson.

The timing was just bloody superb. 

When I checked on him Friday night before I went up to bed, he seemed to be gasping pretty hard to breathe.  His room is a little too big to really effectively humidify, so I took him into my room and popped on the steamer.  He woke up around 1am, crying and coughing, and his poor little body was burning up.  Of course, our temporal scan thermometer chose this very night to give up the ghost, and no amount of resetting or new batteries could revive it.  Which led to mommy throwing it against the wall and pulling out the no-frills Vicks digital.  For future reference – throwing temporal thermometers against a hard surface will 1.) not fix an error message, and 2.) may result in a complete explosion of the offending device.

Okay, will somebody, some much more experienced, cool and level-headed mom tell me this:

How do you hold a sick, crying, squirmy toddler long enough to actually get an armpit temperature reading on a digital thermometer? 

Forget about accurate, I would have settled for actual numbers appearing on the readout.  After about ten minutes of struggling, I decided a rectal temp was right off the menu.  I am fairly certain it would have only resulted in a perforated intestine, or my death by head explosion, whichever came first.  I decided to simply use my trained-scientist-powers of observation to conclude that Harry had a fever, which gave me two options:

1.  A teaspoon of baby ibuprofen, or 

2.  A mad rush to the emergency room.

Since he seemed to be NOT having delirium or convulsions, #1 seemed likely to be sufficient, and being bone-tired and at the end of my rope, I would just have to suffer with the guilt if I was wrong.  And, I would like to interrupt this narrative to tell you that if I could find the person that made children’s medicines taste like something edible enough that they actually take them without complaint or hesitation at 1:30am after screaming for a half-an-hour, I would kiss them.  On the mouth.  Unfortunately, this affection does not apply to the person who designs faulty temporal thermometer chips.

Harry slept (if you can actually call one-hour increments of not-whimpering, sleep) the rest of the night with his hot, sweaty little body propped up against me.  Every time his poor little head got level with his chest, it lead to a fit of coughing so bad he actually started gagging.  Finally, at 6am, we both gave up and went down to breakfast, and off to Walmart to buy another temporal thermometer.  Yeah.  I am a slow learner.

We spent all of Saturday in a battle between Motrin and his body temperature.  I swear, it is the first time I understood what the term “eyes bright with fever” was really supposed to look like.  Normally a whirlwind of motion, Harry didn’t want to leave the front of the television, or my presence, all day.  He rejected his food.  He wheezed.  When his fever spiked he would get chills that started at the top of his head and worked their way to his knees as he visibly shook.  As a professional in the pharmaceutical field, and trained in infectious disease, I wanted to be the last mother in the universe to cry wolf, but after his fever hovered around 102 (if the new thermometer is to be trusted) and ibuprofen would not bring it to bay, I called the pediatrician’s hotline.  They referred me to the after-hours clinic with an appointment that left me with less than five minutes to get out of the house and get in the car, drive through the city like a madwoman, and then sit and wait. 

If I didn’t know Harry was really sick by the time we left the house, after he waited thirty minutes in a crowded waiting room listlessly in my lap without squirming once, I was convinced.

The first thing the pediatrician says to me, is “This kid is burning up!” (well, DUH).  “When was the last time you gave him some Motrin?”  Well, uh, I was supposed to give him a dose about the time we left the house, but I had to rush to get out, and…

He gave me the “Bad Mommy” look.  About the same one my son gives me every time I drop him off at daycare.

“I will give him another dose as soon as I get home.”

“That’s okay, we’ll give him some before he leaves the clinic.   Just make sure to pick up some more when you fill his antibiotic prescription.”  Then he gives me this look like he is assessing whether I am competent enough to read the 1 tsp. line on the dosing syringe. 

About this time, I am fighting the urge to scream “I am a scientist, you overpaid technician!”, and trying not to take it personally.  Then I remember – never argue with the people who own the prescription or traffic ticket pads.  And I also remember that I am the woman who couldn’t hold a thermometer under an armpit for sixty seconds.  I say “Okay” and look at the ground.

I don’t know how many times in a lecture I have said the term “Antibiotics are not magic bullets”, without thinking twice.  Well, now I know that more than one mom was sitting in the audience saying “No shit, Sherlock”.  Saturday night was verse 2 – only longer and louder.  Harry’s temp peaked out at 104 before it was all over and the antiobiotics turned the tide of the little war occuring behind his cheekbones.  It was this morning before the sunny little boy I know so well replaced the cranky, listless stranger that had been hanging around my house and drinking my juice like Florida was running out of oranges.  And I had to take him right back into the war zone.

Daycare is a battlefield, I am telling you.  Believe it.