Is there a doctor in the house?

I’m no math whiz, but there’s one equation of which I am certain. Take the number of children residing in one household and multiply by the number of hours each spends in daycare/preschool/school in a week. Divide by the number of weeks in a year, and multiply by the number of other children who share said classrooms, hallways, bathrooms and drinking fountains. The resulting number is roughly equal to the number of times you will answer your phone in the middle of a work day to hear the words every mother dreads. “Your child just threw up.”

Since the beginning of September, a week hasn’t gone by when someone in our house hasn’t been sick or injured. Between colds, fevers, stomach viruses, bruises and gashes, I’m starting to think it might be cheaper to just hire a doctor to live with us full-time than to pay the office copay. When the receptionist asks your child how last week’s art project turned out, you begin to wonder if you’ve accidentally wandered onto an episode of House.

Vomit doesn’t bother me the way that it does some. As a mother and former teacher, I’ve dealt with every color, odor, consistency, and volume out there. The first time R got a stomach bug as a baby, my husband picked him up from daycare and took him home for the day. When I arrived home from work, the house was eerily quiet. As I turned the corner into the living room, the sight that met my eyes was comical really (this is one of those things that’s easier to laugh about in retrospect). J and R were resting peacefully in the recliner, while every two feet or so from the kitchen to the front door lay cloth burp rags. Puzzled, I woke J to ask what was up. It seems that R wouldn’t stop puking, and J didn’t know what to do with all that vomit. So he covered each puddle over with a burp rag so that it could be dealt with when I got home. Thanks dear.

A couple of months ago, R woke on a school day morning complaining of a stomachache. Since this isn’t a terribly rare occurrence at our house, and since he ate almost all of his breakfast without a hitch and didn’t have a fever, I felt good about sending him on to school for the day. After lunch, the preschool director called to say that R was lying lethargically on the end of the playground slide, so she took his temperature. 102 degrees. Mother-of-the-year right here.

After I retrieved my ailing child, I decided to stop at Walgreens for some children’s Ibuprofen on the way home. R wrapped his hot little arms around my neck as we proceeded to the back of the store. (Side note- Why is it that pharmacies are always at the back of the store? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have them at the front so that people who aren’t feeling well don’t have as far to go? It would also cut down on the number of other shoppers they could potentially infect as they puff and hack their way down the aisles.) We had located the Ibuprofen, made it through the check out line, and were carrying our plunder back to the car. I was feeling confident that we were home free. I set R down in front of me while I unlocked the car doors. He swayed feverishly from side-to-side. I looked into his glassy eyes, and I knew. “Mom, I have to­—“ The words were still hanging in the air when the first wave of vomit hit my shoes. I attempted to quickly spin him around toward the empty pavement, but instead succeeded in hosing the front tire of the van parked beside us (apologies to the driver of the light blue late 90s model Ford Windstar parked at Walgreens that day). I looked around to see if there were witnesses, removed my vomit-covered shoes with as much dignity as possible, peeled R’s shirt off and got the heck out of there.

While R broke us into the joys of parenthood and bodily fluids, K has attempted to outdo any records he may have set by being the first of the two to only make it 20 minutes into a workday before vomiting. I had literally just removed my coat and sat down at my desk when the daycare provider called with the bad news. She started the conversation by asking if K had eaten something orange for breakfast. That’s never a good sign.

K also has the market cornered on most terrifying medical emergencies. We went out for pizza with my in-laws and niece on Halloween before taking the kids trick-or-treating. I was watching R and his cousin enjoying each other’s company when I noticed that K had a strange expression on her face. I had given her some diced peaches to eat while we waited for our pizza. K is what we call in our house an “enthusiastic” eater. When given a food that she enjoys, she doesn’t delicately select one piece at time, place it on her palate, and chew thoroughly while allowing the flavor to flood her taste buds before swallowing. No, she’s more of a shovel-it-in-and-swallow-it-whole kind of eater.

As I continued to watch her, it became clear to me that the expression in her eyes was one of panic. I had seen it on the faces of people who can’t swim and have suddenly been thrown into deep water. It suddenly occurred to me that she couldn’t breathe. Panicked, I yanked her up out of her seat and flipped her upside down over my thigh while slapping her back with my hand. I fleetingly wondered if I was hitting her too hard and hurting her, but in that moment, my fear that she wasn’t breathing outweighed any others. After what seemed like a century, but was probably mere seconds, she started screaming and a cube of slimy peach came flying out. I was so incredibly relieved that I didn’t even notice the trail of slobber and snot that stretched from my pant leg up to the shoulder of my sweater where she rested her head and wailed at the injustice of being treated so indelicately. I now completely understand where the expression, “You’re taking years off my life” came from. I aged 10 years in 60 seconds.

I think the past three months have desensitized me to illness and injury though. Last week, after telling R 15 times to stop running and leaping into the recliner (he likes it when it expels him backward), I watched as he sprinted toward it, but instead of being thrown backward, he hit his head on the solid wood arm rest of the couch. The THUNK that followed resonated through the living room. His head bounced off the armrest, onto the couch cushion and finally came to rest on the floor. It was kind of like watching a pinball machine. He lay there, stunned, but finally came up holding his hand over a growing lump on his forehead. (Think Yosemite Sam after Bugs Bunny hits him over the head with a mallet.) He cried, I comforted, and tried to refrain from saying, “See what happens when you don’t listen to your mother?” In the end, he kept ice on his head for 10 minutes and was fine. And I only checked to make sure his pupils were dilating properly once. Hey, for me it’s progress.