Benjamin Penguin

This will come as no surprise to people with children or people that know people with children or even people with loved ones that they care an awful lot about, but it really sucks to watch your child be so sick. It is such a helpless, hand-wringing, heart-palpating kind of experience. I could not make him well by mere willpower alone but SURELY the repetitive, frantic pacing in circles around my apartment would be enough to eradicate the virus/bacteria/alien life form/piece of cat litter/nothing that provoked such a scarily high fever and subsequent seizure and maternal terror, no? The answer, alas, is a resounding no. We simply had to wait it out and hope for the best.

Ben spiked a fever last Thursday. A 102 degree fever to be exact. This was eyebrow raising but not inherently alarming. As the fever rose over the course of the next few days, spiking at the unholy 104.5 degrees on Saturday, my anxiety level rose with each tenth of a degree. By the time the seizure hit, I was pretty much at my wit’s end anyways and was planning on taking him to the ER regardless because how could this not be bad, right? I think I feared being seen as a reactionary, overly concerned parent, but when we eavesdropped in on a conversation regarding one mother’s concern over her baby spitting up formula absent any other symptoms (hence her ER visit), I suddenly realized that maybe I wasn’t so overly reactionary after all. Something about this felt off. The fever seemed too high and he just didn’t seem like himself. As a parent, it feels like a tremendously fine line between being carefully observant of complications surrounding an illness and the judicious use of medical services and simply reacting to everything that comes your child’s way with overblown hysteria. A cold is not a crisis. A flu is not a crisis. But they COULD be a crisis. They could be step one in a chain of events that leads to my precious baby’s untimely removal from my arms. It’s this mental leap – from innocuous nose sniffles to a terrifying vision of pediatric intensive care units – that makes this fine line between appropriate and reactionary responses seem inconsequential in the moment. When my baby is not sick, I can wax philosophic on the merits of the “wait and see” approach. But when my baby is sick, I find it impossible to be so rational. I do force myself to take a wait and see approach because I am prone to a hypochondriac-induced hysteria that filters my processing of information towards the dramatic and extreme. Sometimes, “wait and see” feels like the right response. Other times, not so much (see: Seizure, Ben’s).

Ben’s temperature is returning to normal, as is his silly disposition. Same with his penchant for unceasing activity. So I feel as though he is on the mend. And since I feel he is on the mend and I am on the other side of a difficult situation, I can now stop and reflect on the events of the past week. While living the difficult situation, my critical thinking skills go out the window and I exist in a primitive survival mode that prompts the phrase “let’s get everyone out of this alive and well” to repeat over and over and over in my head.

It’s the same mechanism that prevented me from writing about my PPD when I was experiencing it. It takes time for me to move from cognitive survival mode to emotional analysis mode. Were I not to do this, I think I would crumble under the weight of the sensory, cognitive and emotional input flowing into my brain. When I look at a picture, I zero in on certain details. The little lines around a person’s mouth. The reflection of the photographer or the environmental surroundings on the glossy surface of the eye.  It’s almost like I can’t manage to take in the whole picture all at once. I have to work my way through all the little details before piecing it together as a whole. Only then can I stand back and marvel at the beauty of the captured image.

So I started out focusing on the warmth of Ben’s skin. Then I focused on the increasing numbers flashing on the digital thermometer. Then the absence of his smiles. Then the absence of his little words and phrases. Then the absence of his toddling in circles around me as I sat on the floor. Because I am meticulous in these observations, I can say with certainty when something is off. I can provide a checklist of sorts that highlights all the ways in which things are different. I can exhaust doctors and nurses with the sheer depth of my information. But I can’t let myself speak about the underlying emotions because to let them pass my lips – to give word to my fears – would render me traumatized. When I was mentioning for the 17th time in a day, “Ben feels warm,” I was really saying, “Please don’t take my baby away from me.” When I diligently recorded another temperature rise on my Excel spreadsheet, I was really writing the words “Please be better and don’t leave Mama.”

He was really quite sick and though I may not have said it, I was terrified at the time. Just wanted to finally say that aloud.