There are six kittens in my upstairs bathroom who are clamoring to get out. They are “of age” and I can’t wait to find homes for them. The ones who don’t have homes are going to have to go to the local shelter. I cannot take them in. Since April we’ve had a growing number of cats… since May 28, we’ve had nine cats in the house. I am reaching the point of critical mass now that the furry things are so mobile and eager to explore, and yet not house-trained. The mama cat isn’t even house-trained. She has to go to the shelter as well. She will make a nice pet for some willing soul. She does not get along with my other two cats. I’ve decided this does not work for me.
Meanwhile, my son Paolo has some sort of illness. Before him, it was Council, with swimmer’s ear problems. It developed into a very high fever and she was dead to the world for a day between visits to grandparents. Even ibuprofen couldn’t fend off the fever of nearly 104 degrees. Finally we took her to the doctor, hoping for antibiotics. What we got was a double ear infection diagnosis and ear drops that had to be administrered for five days, three times a day—on the brink of another visit to grandparents and our four-day camping trip after that. Too much travel to accommodate much nurturing through an illness. But at least we had some kind of remedy.
With all the focus on her I was a bit surprised to see Paolo not feeling well when we picked him up after the grandparents visit on our way to camping. Apparently he’d had a headache and a mild fever the night before, but seemed fine… then I noticed a bug bite and rash in the crease of his hip. It was suspicious-looking but then I am often paranoid about such things. The rash was rectangular-shaped in the area of the hip crease, not the classic bullseye-shape for Lyme disease; plus it was way early for a tick bite to manifest a rash anyway, considering that they’d just been playing in the tick-infested woods the afternoon prior (Council found a tick on herself). What he had, I didn’t know, maybe it was just a virus that Council had contracted along with the ear infections, and she’d passed it along, without us even realizing what she had initially.
I feel like I must spend so much time trying to diagnose things that I should get an honorary degree.
Today I am taking Paolo to the doctor to figure out what might be going on. He seemed to recover after a day of full-on fever while camping. For the last few days he has been relatively normal. Another visit to grandparents later (a third set—we have a lot to go around), he’s acting groggy, grumpy and overall beastly. He’s complaining of neck pain. The glands in the neck that are ordinarily swollen while fending off illness—I guess you’d call them the tonsils—feel fine, but it’s the lymphs near his ears that seem very swollen to me. Plus, he looks like a wreck. He’s complaining of his lips being swollen. The area of the bug bite looks somewhat normal but you can still see where the bite occurred. No rash.
Problem is, I’m paranoid and he’s also a hypochondriac. Last winter he was convinced he had a urinary problem because he had to pee so often. I actually took him to the doctor over it, and I am one to avoid the doctor if at all possible, address problems through home remedies, diagnose things myself if I can. The doctor looked him over and declared all things normal and healthy at that point. Said a lot of kids his age go through a bodily-function-control thing. Okay, I said. Whatever. It helped Paolo sort out his issues, to a degree, to hear that from a doctor.
This time around is a little different—he’s clearly ailing. He’s a beast to get along with—the other kids are acting afraid of him today while we have a relaxing day at home. Otherwise known as bickering all day. So off to the doctor we’ll go.
In addition to the physical remedy Paolo seems to need a lot of emotional and logistical ones. Last night he left a treasured new toy at the house of a Bahá’í friend. It was evening and Paolo fell asleep on his dad’s lap. Not quite normal for him (another worrisome sign for me). As fate would have it, we parents forgot about the toy and it is probably still sitting on the floor in that living room. Paolo is a wreck over the missing toy. It reminded me that we never did fetch a treasured zip-up sweatshirt of his that we’d left at another Bahá’í friend’s house in early May.
Part of me just wants to let go of these things and see where life takes us. We lose stuff, so be it. But Paolo is not one to forget. He reminds me frequently, asks about his stuff. As he should. Today I am going to try to take care of all of these things and see if it helps anything. His health? His mood? His overall sense that everything is alright in the world? A sense of justice and balance? We’ll see.