The last few months have been particularly grueling. It's not language barriers, difficulties at school, transportation, or finances, in spite of that five week government shutdown.
It's our health. The five of us cannot seem to get healthy and stay that way. Seventeen days ago, Dash started fussing loudly in her sleep. This is my clue that she's about to spike a fever and sure enough, she was running about 101 degrees Fahrenheit by 4 AM. She woke with a wet cough as well, so I figured she'd caught some virus at school.
Later that morning, a mother with twins in Dash's maternelle texted me a photo indicating that someone in the class had been diagnosed with scarlet fever. Well, okay then. Dash is coughing and her throat doesn't hurt, so it's not strep.
When her fever went over 102 with ibuprofen in her the following evening, I got worried and we asked a neighbor from our church to come and help give her a Priesthood Blessing. I had also walked to the nearest open pharmacy to purchase acetaminophen. That proved just a bit trickier because the drug names here are different. I put Google to work when the pharmacists offered a specific liquid for fevers to confirm that what I was purchasing was, in fact, what I was looking for.
Shortly thereafter, I smelled it.
If you've had children with it before, you know that smell. The smell of strep throat.
Ugh. It was a Saturday night and the only thing open was the emergency room. I made a call to the Embassy nurse and she agreed to meet me the next morning to check Dash.
She did not run the strep test, mainly because Dash had the swollen lymph nodes, spots on her tonsils, and the unmistakable strep smell. So, we gave her a nice, juicy shot of penicillin and I expected everything to be okay by the next morning.
Nope. Thirty six hours later, Dash was still running a fever over 101 so I took her back in. By then, her throat wasn't red and the lymph node swelling was gone, but Dash was clearly still sick. The clinical diagnosis we were given was "virus" and that I should expect the fever to last 8-10 days and the cough to persist for a couple of weeks after that.
Dash finally went to school for a half day a full week after she'd started showing symptoms. The night before, however, The Reader, who is now 12 years old, started running a fever and coughing. From one child to the next . . .
Four days later, we were in The Netherlands at the Scoliosis Care Clinic, the facility we have picked to treat The Reader's scoliosis. She napped and coughed on the three hour drive up, survived the two and a half hour fitting, and then napped and talked with me on the drive home. It was a very long day. Dash came with us, still coughing, but in good spirits otherwise. On the return trip, the weather was rough. We drove through some snow but mostly it was a slushy rain. In California, driving in the rain wasn't much of a problem because they use reflectors on the highways that can still be seen in a downpour. In Belgium, they do not do that. The paint is minimally reflective so add on a frozen, slushy mess on unfamiliar roads on the outskirts of Antwerp and I was a wreck. I could not see the lines and my life and those of my children were depending on my ability to seeeeeeee. With one quick second of freak out, I maneuvered my van behind a big rig in the slow lane and just stayed there, using his tread marks to line myself up on the road. The lines on the road appear at certain points, but for about 10 kilometers, I was driving with my trust fully on the location of the truck in front of me.
I'm not exaggerating when I say it was the second scariest conditions I've ever driven through. I was so very glad to get HOME that night.
By the following morning, The Reader was running a scary high fever. When our mercury thermometer hit 105.1, I tamped down the immediate panic attack and called the nurse to see if I needed to take her to the ER or not. The verdict was for me to bring her in as quickly as possible, so I had The Reader put on a face mask and we made our way to the embassy.
It was pretty clear to me that she had the same virus as her little sister but because she has more sensitive lungs, it was having a greater impact. The nurse said she had pneumonia, gave her a breathing treatment, and would be willing to give an antibiotic, but since the initial illness was viral, it wouldn't do much but that what was really needed, was for The Reader to get hydrated. It was then that I thought about just how little my fever-running-daughter had drunk on our trip the day before.
Less than 12 ounces of water.
So, with all the effort she could muster, we started having her sip water and an electrolyte beverage, sip by sip, until she was hydrated. Her fever came down to a reasonable level.
Over the course of the next few days, The Reader was supposed to be increasing her number of hours in her new RSC brace. The brace applies pressure to one part of her ribs while allowing room for expansion in another part, helping to reverse the curve in her ribs and increase her lung capacity in the "squished" lung.
Wearing a brace while coughing cannot possibly be fun. Those first few days though, my darling child managed to keep adding hours of brace time at night. First three hours, then five, then six, then eight and last night, she wore it for nine hours. On top of that, she has slowly been adding hours during the day. Today she wore the brace to our two hour church block as well as at least another three hours while we spent the afternoon as a family.
The clinic gave her a schedule to adjust but it seems my daughter is on her own accelerated schedule, which is fine by me!
The brace has a temperature sensor on it to monitor compliance, so The Reader also knows the clinic will be able to read how much she's wearing the brace when we return for her in-brace imaging.
The Reader has missed six school days with her illness and is still coughing but knows she really needs to return to school, so she is planning on that for tomorrow.
That said, Spitfire will not be going to school. She went to school feeling crummy on Friday but because she wasn't running a fever, I sent her anyway. She's now coughing and running a low grade fever, having caught that same stupid virus but not reacting as badly. We haven't had an actual flu test run, but late last week Belgium announced they're officially at "epidemic" level of flu in the country, so I believe it's what my girls have been fighting, one by one.
My husband has been on the brink of illness for over a few weeks, too. It's like he just can't quite get healthy. None of them can.
In all this, I haven't had much more than a little stuffy nose and a mild, dry cough, but that's pretty normal for me no matter the season.
What's happened the last two and a half weeks is just an extension of what we have been dealing with since we moved to Belgium. One illness after another and then another. . . It's exhausting. As I rest in bed at night, thinking about my day, I can't feel anything in my chest. My mind races but my heart beats so softly I can't feel it, and that's unnerving too.
When you go your entire life using your own heartbeat to rhythmically put you to sleep, and then all of a sudden you can't feel it in your chest or hear it in your ears, the silence is deafening.
So as my children get sick one by one, over and over again, I'm left wondering how long I have until my heart beats so softy it just "gives up" . . .
The cardiologist insists my low voltage isn't "that low" and I confess that on these meds, I seem to do pretty good three of every four weeks, but having lost my mother, both my grandmothers, and my mother-in-law at young ages, my own mortality haunts me as I try to sleep.
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