i don’t want to start any blasphemous rumours
but i think that god’s got a sick sense of humour…

(because every summer holiday needs a Depeche Mode soundtrack. so sunny.)

so, we departed Wednesday afternoon for Dave’s family reunion. Oscar’s pinkeye was clearing, and i’d gone into work to get caught up on what i’d missed the day before, and all was well and the car was loaded and we were looking forward to four days of catching up with Dave’s mom’s umpteen brothers and one sister and all their offspring and their offsprings’ offspring, and eating a lot and drinking some wine and Oscar playing with cousins by the beach. it was going to be a pastoral good time in the bosom of family, freed from our series of poxplagues and with grandparents around to help corral the little bundle of toddling delight that is our boy.

ha. chortle. snicker.

our boy woke up at an ungodly hour Thursday morning with his nose running like a faucet. sneezing ensued. then coughing. eventually, full-blown bronchiolitis and gasping for breath.

to make a long, tragic tale concise…holiday was spent sans internet, chasing snotty sick child to keep him from infecting cousins, walking with him through sleepless nights of misery like we haven’t experienced in a year, prattling on to people i’ve only met once before about Oscar’s illness like some sort of helicopter-parent hypochondriac, and hiding in family basement once i too caught the cold and began to feel as if my throat was full of glass shards.

we did see the sights, though. the local hospital, to be precise. ever try to keep a fifteen-month old in one small room (with a weird, archaic, prison-like crib) for twenty-four hours? when nurses only seem to come in while he’s sleeping and otherwise expect you to entertain and supervise child in room full of dangerous metal corners and fascinating medical objects? good times.

for Oscar’s photo album, a shot of him behind bars with his cell mate.

O in hospital

and him and Daddy snuggling on the parent bed, supplied so that you can put your wee darling ‘back to sleep’ repeatedly after they come in every two hours to drag him from his crib and fondle him with cold stethoscopes.

O & dad in hospital

but…he’s better. breathing normally, back to just having a cold, poor kidlet. this was his fourth bout with bronchiolitis, which doesn’t bode well for the overall state of his lungs, given that almost any cold seems to settle there and rob him of oxygen in a matter of hours. his blood SATs were down to 88% by the time they got him measured, even though this didn’t seem nearly as dramatic an attack as the one that got him hospitalized in December, nor the one that took us to the emergency room in Prague. scary. not life and death, scary, no, so long as Dave & i continue to risk being thought neurotics who trot the boy to emerge whenever we see him pant – and i can live with that, particularly given that we’re batting 1000 on home diagnosis – but still scary to the mother in me who wants him to be some imaginary version of whole and not weighed down by a limitation like asthma, which looms on the horizon like a label just waiting for a home.

and to the petulant sot in me who just wants to lounge a vacation away without illness, eating bonbons and indulging in wine and company, too.

yeh, i know. let the snickerfest begin.

(and tune in next week when hopefully this blog will no longer read like a reject script from ‘General Hospital’ and we’ll all be hale and hearty and you’ll hear Nurse Bonnie say…well…something new).