December 18, 2002
Sick day for little one with big cold
By GARRET LEIVA
Herald editor
Despite the fact that I feel peachy keen, today is a sick day. Unfortunately, our little one has a big cold.
One of the not so joys of parenthood is staying home from work with your ill infant. Ella has come down with her first winter cold, but there won't be scrapbook pages commemorating this moment. Along with the full-blown crud, she has a three-pack-a-day cough that sounds like Andrew Dice Clay going cold turkey.
It doesn't take an MD behind your name or a prescription pad with bad handwriting to reach a diagnosis: severe case of the yuckies.
Today is a stay in your footed pajamas day - for Ella, too. I try tickling her funny bone, but my rogues' gallery of foolish facial features can't even muster a two-tooth grin. Instead, all attempts at humor are met with a blank stare usually reserved for trigonometry pop quizzes. Sadly, Ella is too sick to smile.
When sickness strikes adults, we curl up in the fetal position and complain. It's called being a baby. Unfortunately, when your entire vocabulary consists of monosyllable gibber-jabber, it's hard to tell people where it hurts. The adages of starving a fever or feeding a cold Campbell's chicken soup are also lost on a nine-month-old.
However, watching Andy Griffith reruns while sprawled out on the couch provides medicinal benefits even for babies; albeit unconfirmed by the New England Journal of Medicine.
While a visit with Barney Fife or Aunt Bee might cheer Ella up, our trip today is to the doctor's office, not Mayberry. After some poking and prodding, the nurse practitioner gives us the bad news: bilateral ear infection. It looks like our little girl's Christmas stocking might be filled with Zithromax instead of candy canes.
As a baby, I had my own bouts with ear infections. At one point it got so bad; my parents considered buying Amoxicillin in 55 gallon drums. Thankfully, I outgrew these ear infections. Aside from the typical childhood fare of chicken pox, 103.5 ice-cubes-in-the-bathtub fevers and a weird allergy to wheat, I faired pretty well.
I stayed so healthy, that during grade school I plastered my bedroom walls with perfect attendance awards. You never caught me moaning or groaning on the Army green sick cot outside the principal's office. Then I caught a case of lovesickness and the flu bug.
Now up until fourth-grade, I never had to face this scenario since my feelings for girls never went beyond Tonka truck induced indifference. Then Miss Ruth came to class.
She was a student teacher in her senior year at Central Michigan University. Everyday she would write on the chalkboard, her lovely brown hair swaying with the stroke of each cursive letter. Sometimes she would call on us to answer math problems and although I hated long division, I loved Miss Ruth.
Of course, as with any school-age crush, things didn't work out with Miss Ruth. It wasn't because I gave her too many apples or wrote her name all over my notebook. Instead, I threw up.
I was striving for my second year in a row of perfect attendance when I started feeling ill. Miss Ruth suggested I go lay down on the sick cot, but I decided to stay in her classroom during lunch hour. Unfortunately, instead of eating cafeteria goulash, I tossed my cookies from home. At that moment, as Miss Ruth went down to the janitor's room for a coffee can full of absorbent orange stuff, my crush was crushed.
While the Miss Ruth episode was a lesson in humility, basketball camp at Alma College provided a real clinic in food poisoning. A bad batch of burgers from the snack bar sidelined more than half the campers. Instead of working on cross-over dribbling or outlet passes, I practiced bank shots off the toilet bowl.
During my college years, brown bottle flu kept me in bed and out of a few morning classes. I did come down with a legitimate illness my freshman year: mononucleosis. Strangely, that semester I pulled down a 3.85 grade point. I was so sick, all I could do was lay there and study. If only I would have contracted tsetse fly sleeping sickness, I might have graduated magna cum laude.
Although my wife and I are relatively healthy, we now have a cute, cuddly petri dish in our lives. I've already caught myself using a shirt sleeve to wipe Ella's runny nose - and this is just the beginning. Countless colds, coughs and aches await us as parents.
Who knows, at this rate I might have to take another sick day if our little one decides to share her germs with daddy. If that happens, we'll find out who is the real cry baby in the family - probably the one whistling the theme song to Andy Griffith while sprawled out on the couch.
Grand Traverse Herald editor Garret Leiva can be reached at 933-1416 or e-mail gleiva@gtherald.com