Everyone in my family has had a cold in recent weeks.  And now it’s my turn.  When other people have a cold it seems like a minor inconvenience and I say things like, “Get some rest.  Drink more water.”

When I have a cold, I feel like it would only be appropriate to cancel school and work and hire a nurse to bring me soft tissues and warm blankets and steaming mugs of homemade chicken noodle soup.

The reality is more like me producing massive piles of used tissues and wishing I could breathe like a normal person and working while coughing.  No fun.

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Today was my daughter’s second-to-the-last soccer game (not counting tournaments that happen after the regular season).  The sun shone and I wasn’t the only one wearing a sweater or sweatshirt even though in Seattle these temperatures would be cause for sunbathing and a trip to the water-park.  It was sunny, but overnight it had been cool (fifty degrees, maybe), so we embraced the fall, such as it is here in Southern California.  By the time the game started at 9:30 AM, the temperature was pretty close to perfect.

Even better than the weather was the actual game.  The opponent was tough–as tough as a bunch of 10-years olds with ponytails can be–and our girls played excellent soccer.  They won 3-0.

The rest of the day has been considerably less exciting.  I went to Costco.  I cooked homemade chicken soup and put it in the CrockPot.  I napped and picked up and dropped off kids at work.  I watched football with my husband while he coughed and I sneezed.  I washed an awful lot of dirty dishes that had been lurking around the house.  (One word of explanation:  kids.)   I read a book about hiking the Appalachian Trail.  I worked a little at the computer and contemplated doing a load or two of laundry.  (Verdict:  No laundry for me today, thanks anyway.)

Now, go wash your hands with lots of soap and hot water so you don’t catch the plague.  It’s too late for me, but maybe it’s not too late for you.

Yesterday, my fingers discovered two lumps in my neck, one directly under my chin and one under the corner of my jaw.  I’m not prone to lumps in my neck, though my dad was.  While showering, he felt a lump in his neck and one thing led to another.  He had Hodgkin’s disease while still in his twenties, so I was introduced to the terror of cancer when I was a young girl.  The cancer didn’t kill him, then, though.  It took another bout with cancer–melanoma–twenty years later to do him in. 

At any rate, lumps kind of scare me, even though I know that we all have strings of glands in our necks which swell when we’re fighting off infections.  I know this.  And I am dragging a little bit, fatigued, clearing my throat a little more than normal.  So, even though I can’t stop fingering these symmetrical lumps, I am certain (mostly) that I am in no danger of dying young.  (I will die, however, since that is the fate of all human beings.  Alas.)  I’m just fighting off a little virus which is no surprise since my daughter was sort of sick last week.

But I can’t stop teasing my husband.  He wanted me to make popcorn for him and I said, “Yes, I and my lumps will make you popcorn.”  And we talked about how I could just be disposed of in the Back Yard Hole.  (Please, though, send flowers.  Lots of flowers.  No donations in my name to any charitable cause, just an excess of flowers.)

Really, the truth is that I and my lumps are going to bed early tonight, partly so we can finish reading To Kill a Mockingbird and partly because we are utterly exhausted from checking our email every ten minutes without fail throughout the whole day.

When I woke up at 7:10 a.m., I thought perhaps I’d slept right through her crying. Or maybe she was dead. I jump to conclusions like that. (Do you, too?) She fell asleep in my arms last night at around 6:30 p.m. and roused a few times until finally, I put her to bed at 8 p.m. She woke up once at about 9 p.m. and while I fully expected her to wake up in the night, she did not.

She slept until 7:30 a.m.

But she woke up still complaining about her tummy ache. (No mention of ear pain.) I started to wonder when the last time was she’d . . . well, you know. Then I thought maybe she has a bowel obstruction and needed x-rays and surgery, stat! But, as the morning wore on, she padded upstairs to the bathroom and took care of business.

Later, she coughed once and winced, so her ear hurts a little, but not enough to wake her in the night.

I daresay we are going to live through the Great Plague of 2006.

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Now, in other business . . . if you link to this blog and would like me to include your blog in my reciprocal blogroll, will you please email me or leave a comment? Thanks!

Did you hear me rustling around in my kitchen this morning . . . at 3:48 a.m.? Did you inhale the scent of olive oil and fresh garlic and say to yourself, My, my, that Mel is one industrious Christian woman, up before dawn to prepare Italian food! Then did you notice the pajama-clad three-year old sitting on the kitchen counter weeping?

She was weeping because her ear hurt. I’d known that since midnight, the first time she woke up, crying. I think she accepted some medicine, then. I can’t remember anymore. At 3:00 a.m., I’d hurried to her room again, rocked her, put her back to bed, only to be woken at 3:48 a.m. Or had I even slept? I don’t think so, because by 3:48 a.m., I had formulated a Plan of Action.

My Plan of Action included a drop or two of warm olive oil dropped in her aching ear. The garlic is dunked into the oil because of its anti-bacterial properties. I haven’t had an ear infection in my house in many years, but I remembered well that the garlicky oil worked on my 8-year old when he was an infant. So, 3:48 a.m. found us in the kitchen. At 4:00 a.m., I laid her on the ground, ear up, and dropped oil into it.

She screamed, a scream worthy of Drew Barrymore.

And then she slept until 6:35 a.m. When she woke, I rocked her in her room and we both dozed until 7:48 a.m., which was horrifying because I needed to wake up my son, get him off to school, shower and be prepared to meet Baby 16-Months Old at the door. By 8:30 a.m.

My daughter’s ear ached off and on throughout the day. I faked her out and put some ibuprofen in a drink for her. Then her stomach hurt the rest of the day (and still does). She went to sleep early, but woke up once already. (Her 3-year old buddy showed the first symptoms of this illness this afternoon. Am I in a horrible re-run?) I don’t intend to take her to the doctor at this point. She refuses to take medicine by mouth and so a seven or ten day course of antibiotics sounds like a seven or ten day cruise through hell. Plus, studies seem to indicate that eighty percent of ear infections clear up on their own in four to seven days.

But will I survive until then? For those of you keeping score at home: Since February 10–long-lasting cold, followed by sore throat. Brief hiatus, then stomach virus. Just as the stomach virus ended, this flu/virus hit. ENOUGH! Enough. Enough!

My 8-year old son hasn’t been to school since the nurse sent him home on Monday morning. He’s hardly eaten a thing and looks noticeably thinner, but today, he perked up a bit. He laughed at cartoons and played his Nintendo DS and ate a little. I thought tomorrow he’d go back to school.

My 3-year old suddenly grew whiny this evening. She was playing Candyland with her daddy when she complained that her legs hurt. She quit the game and had her evening bath. When she came out of the bath, she was shivering and crying. My husband kept saying, “I think she’s sick,” and I didn’t want to believe it, but by 7:00 p.m., she wanted to go to bed. She cried and said she was cold. She felt warm. I covered her up and turned off her light.

At 8:00 p.m., my son finished his bath and from our room, we heard him crying. I rushed to him and found him shivering. “I’m so cold!” he cried. I dried him off and dressed him in pajamas while he asked to go to the hospital. He described feeling weird and cold and pain in his muscles. I brought him medicine and covered him in four blankets. He looked up at me, his green eyes shining with tears and said, “Mom, if it gets any worse than this, I want an ambulance.”

At 9:00 p.m., screams startled me. I hurried upstairs to find my daughter shrieking and burning hot. She’d had a bad dream (the t.v. was going up and down in her dream, how horrific!). I attempted to coerce her into swallowing one teaspoon of ibuprofen, which she promptly dribbled out of her wide-open-screaming mouth. At which point, I, Miss Florence Nightingale, hollered and scolded while she shook and cried.

Then I washed us off and carried her downstairs, where we tried again. This time, she cooperated, even though her hand trembled and tears ran down her face. We rocked for a while and then she told me she was tired and so I took her back to her room, where we rocked again. Then, to bed.

I have now been sitting anxiously, wondering if I hear a child crying somewhere. I telephoned the mother of the baby I watch to let her know we seem to have the flu. They’ve already been exposed, all three of the kids I watch, so I’m not sure what to do now but carry on.

Arrrrrgh! That’s my hearty pirate yell, which I reserve for situations such as this which leave me with nothing to do but yell. My grandmother’s 100th birthday is Friday. We’re supposed to attend a huge family dinner (a reunion, really)in her honor that night. Clearly, we can’t go if we are contagious with the flu, because it simply wouldn’t do to have anyone ask: “And what did you give your grandmother upon the occasion of her one hundredth birthday?” because then, I’d have to say, “The flu,” and how rude would that be?

I wrote a long post, but pretty soon, it sounded like this to me, “and so I . . . and then I . . . and I felt . . . . and blah blah blah blah blah.” I bored even myself.

So, I’m going to just summarize.

All week, I’ve been suffering from a virus which is trying to kill me. My head aches even worse when I cough. I’ve been hot, then cold, feverish, then shivering. Each day seems worse. My daughter has it, too, and really, the only thing worse than being sick is being sick and having a sick whiny 3-year old begging you to hold her when you already are holding her.

What I hate is that when you are a mother and you are sick, the only part that matters is that you are a mother. You have no sick days, no one to stroke your forehead and bring you gingerale and tell you to just stay in bed all day.

I hate that.