The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

A mother knows.

Yesterday, after a lunch of chocolate chip pancakes and a good bit of teasing, M. and I went to our respective computers while the wee one settled into watching 'Dora the Explorer'. Her hearing is nearly restored, after an ear infection rendered her essentially deaf, and she's been much more exuberant this past week or so, giddy as she should be. I stared at the screen, building my cyber dream house, but was seriously considering slinking into the unmade bed to my left, a proper Sunday past time, in my opinion. Just as I was about to do so, I heard the wee one coughing downstairs, but something in that cough made me sit straight up and listen. There was desperation in the coughing, following by barely audible whimpers, but a mother knows when something is off. A mother bolts from her room at the top of the stairs and makes it to the bottom without feeling a step touch the bottom of her feet.

She was crying softly, itching madly, and looked up to me with the most pitiful and terrified expression I'd ever seen. She said she was 'sooooo' itchy, couldn't stop, and she was nearly mad with the sensation. I could tell by the relentless coughing and the slow creeping discolouration of her skin that something was very wrong, that she was reacting to something. What was it? Spider bite? Poison Ivy? Peanut Satay sauce from the night before? I stripped her down and readied the bathtub with cool water and baking soda before rushing into M.'s office to tell him to get to the drug store immediately to buy Benadryl. I was trying to be calm, but I made it clear that this was no time for his usual 'you're overreacting, everything's fine!' speeches. He went, in a flash, walked the five minutes to the nearby store while I tried to calm the wee one in the tub while watching her neck, throat and ears turn fire engine red. She said her fingers felt 'strange' but she couldn't describe it any better, and I asked if they were numb, if they were tingling, to which she asked for an explanation. Do they feel sparkly? I asked, trying to make it sound fun. It was the best I could do. She nodded, said her neck hurt, and I pulled her from the tub and dressed her in new clothes, still unsure if this was a topical reaction or internal.

M. came back, saying the drug store was closed but that he'd bought calamine lotion at the grocery store. Calamine lotion? Really? I said not to worry about that now, just help me get her to the car. She's going to the hospital!, I said definitively. I knew he might still be thinking I was overreacting, which made me seethe with anger, because why is it always the mother who has the appropriate response in a time of a child's distress? Why do the dads typically downplay these things? It seems to happen in every family I know, the dad saying it's not a big deal while the mother is fighting to keep the terrified tears in. Let me just say this again, a mother knows.

He stopped in front of the emergency room doors and I carried her in, momentarily stunned by how quiet it was. M.'s friend C. who is a physician always says that the best day to go to the emergency room is a sunny one, because no one goes to the hospital then. When it rains, there is always a sudden surge in need. Just one of those things. A bored looking triage nurse said hello in a disinterested way as she handed me a form on a clipboard, while the wee one nuzzled her face in my neck.

'What's the problem?', she asked flatly.

'I think she's having a...'

And, then the wee one looked at the nurse, who immediately jumped to her feet and told me to follow. I threw the clipboard on her desk and tried to keep pace with her down the hall as every nurse and meandering doctor stopped and stared at my child who was quite obviously in trouble. Before I knew it, she was on a bed with two or three doctors looking at her, nurses hooking her up to machines, people talking about IV's and injections, and I tried to steady myself, wondering where M. was, if he had parked the car. The wee one was not crying, but was confused, asking questions like 'what's going on there?' and 'what's that all about?'. Have to say, I was proud of her composure.

When M. got to the room I could tell he was not expecting the full team of people who were working our daughter. He just doesn't get worked up easily when it comes to her health, always the voice of reason, the one who tries to be rational at any cost. We both stood back and gave the wee one reassuring looks, until a syringe was brought out, at which point she looked beyond suspicious. I held her hand and tried to get her to focus on me when the injection was done, but she burst into tears, which had me thinking about doing the same. She said her toes felt 'weird', that they were vibrating, and her body was covered in welts. People were calling out heart rates, blood pressure rates and other things I don't understand, while my child looked tiny and innocent, wires fixed to her little body.

Eventually, the drama passed, and the numbers of professional people lessened. One doctor and one nurse stayed, questioning me as to what my girl had eaten during the day, but I shook my head emphatically.

'No, she only had pancakes. She's been on amoxicillin, though, for an ear infection. Today was the tenth day and I gave her dose this morning.'

I don't know why it occurred to me that this was the problem, but nothing else made sense. The peanut from the night before would have brought on an immediate reaction, and a spider bite would have brought on a topical response, according to the doctor. So, the doctor sat back on his chair and said 'Number one on the hit parade, penicillin allergy.'

There's been no confirmation on this yet, but they seemed satisfied that this was a reaction to the medicine, given that twenty per cent of people develop a 'threshold' for the antibiotic, developing acute reactions to it at any time. This means that she will have to wear a medic alert bracelet from now on, but we told her it was a reward for her being such a brave girl.

'It will be silver? Oh goody! That's my favourite!'.

When we got home, my body became overwhelmed with fatigue. I had been so focused in that emergency room, so bent on appearing calm for my girl's sake, that when the relief hit, it took everything I had left in me. There had been no food in the house, since my trip to the grocery store was put off due to the events, so I made rice with a lentil, spinach and balsamic vinegar concoction. M. loved it, and I made the wee one pasta with butter and broccoli. Thankfully, mercifully, M. had bought me a Snickers bar, which I nibbled at with a kind of slow fanaticism, like a beaver gnaws on wood. It helped, but only slightly, and because we had decided that she would go to school today, we were up early after a night of troubled dreams. I am finding myself thinking about her a lot, and I checked on her a few times in the night to make sure she was still breathing. Now, is when I tend to overreact. To me, it makes good sense.

I hate it, though, that M. always looks at me like I'm deranged when I express concern over things that I feel warrant the attention. I get that women tend to be emotional in men's eyes, but let's face it, we know. We employ feelings as well as logic and this is why we're the ones the kids run to when they have fevers or need someone to help them blow their nose. There is an unspoken rule that the mothers are more in tune with their kid, some kind of invisible umbilical cord that is never cut, and if I were to say to M., he'd be hurt as well as offended.

What I can't stop thinking about, though, is how I was the one who heard her coughing. I was the one who got up to check. Would he have heard her? Would he have assumed it was nothing and continued with his usual activities? When she fell in February, wasn't it him who had no idea it happened until she came upstairs to tell him so? It bothers me, knowing that he gets so involved in his work that he doesn't hear the world around him. It bothers me that he expects me to think he is just as on top of things as I am when I have witnessed incidents where the opposite is true. Is it a man thing? Does he pull back when I'm home? I don't know, but I think there needs to be an honest conversation about it at some point. This is my kid, too. All I care about is her well-being, and his feelings don't really have much to do with it.

I just think that a mother knows, you know?