That Time of Year Again

Cold season has officially begun. Hurray. Last week we took the annual preventative measure of getting flu shots for everyone--figuring, at the very least, it MIGHT keep everyone in the house from puking ourselves dry at the same time. Sadly, there is no shot available to keep the kids (and us) from picking up pretty much everything else that's floating around. And with Gabe and Libby in contact with lots of other kids and people, we're pretty much guaranteed to get whatever is going around.

About two years ago, I lamented a fact that is often lost on everyone who hasn't raised small children: in essence, it's about as easy to figure out what is wrong with a sick child as it is to discern the ailment a sick pet is suffering from.

Once, when our cat Tsunami was just two years old, we discovered that she loved pumpkin seeds. I'm not sure HOW, exactly, we stumbled onto that knowledge--probably it involved someone in our house (I was living with my brother and two other friends at the time in a rental) being a bit drunk and figuring it sounded like a good idea to offer the cat what we were eating. Anyway, she loved them. For the next day or so, until the seeds ran out, we would drop a few on the floor for her to eat along with us. She snarfed them up happily.

About two days later--after we'd forgotten that we even gave her the seeds--she became quite lethargic (this is saying something, as Tsu is notoriously fat and lazy, so for her to be noticeably moreso was an accomplishment). She spent most of the days lying on my bed. And she was drooling ALL the time, to the point where she completely soaked the foot of my bed. Since I was a mostly unemployed graduate student living off student loans at the time, I opted to wait and see what was going on for a little while.

As it turned out, that was just as well. I'm reasonably sure that, if I'd taken her to the vet for an examination, they would have charged me a couple hundred dollars, given me some antibiotics, and informed me that she was suffering from some sort of virus or other (or they would have run a whole slew of tests, charged me a thousand dollars, and then made up some ailment that I could treat her for--as there would have been zero chance that they would have ACTUALLY figured out what was wrong with her unless they pumped her stomach). It turns out, cats don't digest pumpkin seeds. They just sat in her stomach for three or four days, causing her discomfort and creating drool. I figured this out, after working through three sets of saliva saturated bedding, when she ralphed up ALL of the pumpkin seeds onto the comforter that I had just cleaned. And there they were, ten or twelve undigested pumpkin seeds. She was perfectly fine after that.

That's the thing with pets. They can't TELL you what's wrong, so you have to create a diagnosis based on the symptoms they are displaying. And kids are pretty much the same way.

When Norah, inexplicably, started exploding pooh all over herself and her diaper around her first birthday, after we figured out that it wasn't some virus or other, all we could do was carefully watch her and her diet and try to see if there was some connection (because she wasn't displaying any symptoms of illness besides disgusting and traumatic--for us--splattercraps). After about a week and a half, we established that she has some sort of apple allergy. Since then, we've periodically tried to give her apple products, just to see if she's over it (our friend's child was violently allergic to oats for about a year but then, weirdly, just got over it). So far--as her diapers from these last few days will attest (I gave her an apple fruit bar on Monday)--she hasn't.

Anyway, about two years ago, I thought to myself, "I can't wait until Gabe can talk so he can tell us what's wrong with him and we can fix it more quickly and effectively." As it turns out, this was wishful thinking on my part.

See, despite the fact that Gabe can communicate rather effectively now, he simply lacks the proper frame of reference to be able to self-diagnose. A stomach ache from being sick is different from a stomach ache from being hungry, but he doesn't really know that (that doesn't stop him from using the "upset tummy" excuse whenever he can--usually making the "logical" leap that filling it with candy would make it stop). Stuffed sinuses from a cold might cause a head or jaw ache, but he doesn't know that.

So that's where we are right now. Yesterday, out of the blue, he started crying and saying he was hot and sweaty and that his mouth hurt. He wasn't running a fever and he wasn't sweaty, but who knows what might have been going on in his mouth. Was his filling from last week hurting? Was it sinus pressure? Did he bite his tongue (this one he SHOULD be able to tell us about, but that would also require some kind of longer term memory for self-inflicted trauma, which he really hasn't developed yet)?

Who knows? So, like I did with Tsunami all those years ago, all I can do is watch and wait and hope. And, just as I was doing two years ago, I will continue to long for the day when he can actually tell me what's wrong so that I can make it better. At least I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that pumpkin seeds aren't the problem this time.