School Sickness Season is upon us! Aust Jr. started his first year of preschool in mid-August and the Nerevar House hasn’t been healthy since.
The First Sickening
Cold number one occurred around the twentieth of August. My son was actually sick on the day of his birthday party. The poor little guy only had energy for a couple of hours of celebration before he had to rest. Thankfully, all attendees were family who had already had recent contact with him, so nobody was prevented from seeing him. The sickness hung around our house for a few weeks after. I decided to tough that one out as it didn’t hit me that hard.
The Second Sickening
Around the middle of September, cold number two arrived. My son got a pretty gnarly ear infection from this one. The doctor gave him some liquid antibiotic that we spent the following week trying to get him to ingest. It was a struggle.
I was still carrying some symptoms from cold number one, so when this one made its way to me, I went to the doctor and got some antibiotics myself. I finished the ten day round of medicine and was feeling mostly better, with only a little sinus congestion remaining.
Enter Cold Number Three, RSV
My son started coughing and having trouble sleeping through the night at the beginning of October, just three short days after I finished my round of antibiotics. There was a moment when I looked at my wife and said, “I don’t think I can go through this again.” I wasn’t talking about getting sick myself. I meant the ordeal that is struggling to get my son to take medicine, working to help him heal, and operating on minimal sleep. When sick, our son usually keeps us up most of the night due to his discomfort. We were both so tired of it. Thankfully, my son healed quickly. But within five days, I was feeling the effects myself.
I left work early one day and went to urgent care where they (very non-urgently) went about running some tests on me. After two hours of waiting and submitting myself to all sorts of tests they told me I’d contracted RSV, a common respiratory illness contracted by young children in school, and that it had cause pneumonia to develop in my lungs. Yay!
Thankfully, the antibiotics they gave me this time seem to be making short work of the illness. I’m already feeling a lot better. I’m mainly dealing with the fatigue now. I must admit, I haven’t felt this badly since we had COVID around two years ago, but recovery time for this seems to be a lot faster. Thank the gods.
For some reason I chose to write about all this here, as I lay up in bed resting. Proquestination #002 was supposed to be a review of Return to Monkey Island, but that’s not done yet. I have a few things to say on it, but haven’t made the time to jot them down in one place as is usually the case with any type of organized thoughts I have. If nothing else, let this entry serve as a warning for any parent about to put their child into preschool. Apparently, this is the norm for the first year. Prepare to be sick, for what feels like forever.
