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Cold Front
Somebody brought it into the house. Jill began to snarkle and blow shortly after we moved into our new apartment, which I attributed to the dust and cardboard fibers filling the air. Within a few days she was laid low.
"Yeah," said Jill, "'Somebody' whose initials are 'Jeff Stimpson.'"
"Don't give it to me," I said.
"Try it pregnant!" Jill replied. She distributed boxes of Kleenex strategically through the rooms and ripped-open containers of Dayquil capsules appeared in our bathroom wastebasket. Soon her sense of taste was gone and her voice took on a rasp like Brenda Vaccarro's. She coughed a deep cough, and pulled a muscle in her bulging stomach.
"Every now and then I cough up something that reminds me of one of those bits of ectoplasm in Ghostbusters," she said.
 Then, worse still, I got it. Somehow colds -- even this bugger -- still don't grasp me. My hankies still became my best friends, stiffening in my pockets, and nasal spray and Vicks became part of my bedtime routine. I took to dropping my own opened bubbles of Nyquil into the wastebasket.
Then Alex got it.
For two winters we've lived in terror of colds. We'd heard stories of how colds with vicious new initials could reverse the clock for former BPDers. Alex got a drug to fight RSV last year -- $1,000 a shot and worth every cent, I see now -- but this year his pediatrician said he didn't need it. And Alex seemed healthy at least through 4 a.m. Tuesday, when he woke up crying and hungry. I held the sippy cup while he sucked down a whole bottle, then I coughed and blew my heavy nose and we all went back to sleep.
On Wednesday morning, Alex began to cough. It racked him for hours on end. I could hear those little lungs try their best over and over and into the night. Eventually deep dimples began to appear under his ribs with every breath. We put on the oxygen cannula, and didn't take it off. From a sitting position in his crib his head would pitch to the side. He seemed to sleep little, but would lie with his eyes open until he realized we were watching him, then he'd close his eyes and pretend to be asleep. He stopped eating and drinking.
 Thursday we took him to the doctor. "There's a nasty one going around," the doctor said. Every kid's having it. For kids like Alex it can be very bad. Alex doesn't have many reserves. Old lines. Don't skimp on the oxygen, the doc advised. Give nebs every four hours. Here are your steroids and antibiotics. Without warning our evenings, which have for months trembled on the verge of a normal family life, were fragmented again by stretches of time between medicines.
Friday Alex barely got up. We switched to grape Dimetapp, but it didn't seem to bring him around like children's Tylenol. (Both smelled fruity and enticing, but I tried them both and they tasted like wax.) I went to work, and spent the lunch hour with my pockets stuffed with stiff handkerchiefs and the wrappers of Hall's Honey Lemon drops, and walked store to store to find Jill Puffs tissues with lotion.
At about 3 in the afternoon I called Jill. "At this moment he's sitting up and eating Cheerios," Jill said. I informed the pediatrician. "Sooner or later he's going to have to turn a corner on this thing." Can we keep giving Tylenol every four hours? Of course.
Oxygen round the clock. Fiddling with the probe to get a clear signal on the Pulse-ox that we haven't used overnight for months and were on the verge of returning. Suddenly Alex couldn't go in the carriage without being attached to a little B tank of oxygen, which is about the size of a thermos bottle. Just a few days before he'd needed only a quarter-liter -- when he needed oxygen from the tank at all. Now it amazed me how fast a B tank drained on the flow Alex needed. When he rolled over in bed, the wires turned into the same knot we used to wrestle with when we brought him home. From his drawers we rooted out supplies that we haven't used in months. Syringes, tubing, tape that no longer sticks.
Sooner or later he will turn a corner on this thing.
 Not Saturday, as his sats continued to dip even as we cranked the oxygen tank closer and closer to one liter. We rushed him to the pediatrician's in late morning. "There's a nasty one out there," said the doctor who was covering for the weekend. She gave us a new antibiotic and a new neb formula and instructed us to take him home, force sugary juices in with a syringe if necessary, and whap him on the chest and back to loosen the mucus.
"Call me later," the doc says.
Yes, whap him, before the numbers sink some more and we wind up headed for the hospital and sleeping on a cot beside his bed, holding his free hand while they search for a vein for the IV, watching him watch the alarms and screens that for months were his night time companions but that now, to him, have nothing to do with his home.
We used to have these pads to whap him. We inflated them with a syringe. We got home and I rooted for them and Jill rasped that we threw them out weeks ago. In the end we just use our hands.
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