lawnrrd | lawnrrd Fever: Catch It!

We three—mama, papa, and baby—have the flu.

In a way, this is entirely our nanny's fault. She normally takes vacation when we do, but, this year, for reasons still not completely clear to me, she needed to go back to her family in Trinidad for just over two weeks. So we fell back on various backup child care arrangements that my wife's employer makes available. For two days, in the first week of the nanny's vacation, this meant day care. And day care means all kinds of new and interesting pathogens.

Leo, being the generous sort, first passed the flu on to his mother at the beginning of this week. One of them gave it to me midweek: I had some sinus problems on Wednesday, and by the next morning I could barely sit up in bed. By that night, I couldn't keep down even water. Our various fevers have jumped up and down all week like the Dow Jones.

By now, I think we're all on the mend to various degrees. Our fevers have all more or less broken, or at least been seriously bent. Leo is still snotty¹ and sneezing. He has also announced that he is "tired and cranky."²

Mrs.

lawnrrd is still tired and achy, too. She's also incredibly annoyed because she was supposed to take a spa weekend with her friends, plans that she just had to cancel.

As for me, I'm still having issues with verticality, but things are improving. Coughing only sometimes makes my head feel about to explode. I'm also bemused because I've been getting flu shots regularly. It's one thing to know, intellectually, that they don't always work, and that the formulators don't always guess the strains correctly.³ It's another thing to throw up next to your own bed at three AM.

¹Not that there's anything unusual about that—there's a reason why the phrase "snotnose kid" is a cliché.

²Which is, to my quite literally fevered imagination, only a short distance from, "I hate you, dad. You're a failure, and your life is meaningless."

³ In fact, about a quarter of this winter's flu cases in New York—presumably including mine—are a strain that was not in this year's shot.