My daughter is thirteen years old. She’s been sick before, like your kid has been sick before. But after so many years, I’ve become used to it. I’ve developed a certain courage and self-assuredness. So when she came home from her sightseeing tour of Boston and New York feeling a little run-down, I thought it was jet-lag and post-trip depression. We put her to bed and that was that.

But then, the next morning, after my wife went off to work, my little girl walked into the bedroom shivering. Again, I’ve seen her sick, but this really took me aback. It was in the mid-sixties and yet she was wrapped in a blanket and her teeth were chattering enough to put a real fright into me.

She laid down in our bed and I ran to get the thermometer. A hundred and three point one. Wow. I was stunned. I almost slipped into a full-blown panic, but I caught myself and started troubleshooting. She didn’t have any other visible symptoms, and when I asked, she said she didn’t have any stomach pain or headache or anything else. So I popped a few Ibuprofen into her and covered her with a few more blankets. I then waited, figuring that I’d take her to a doctor if the fever didn’t go down, or if any new serious symptom arose.

However, after much pacing, it turned out that the Ibuprofen did it’s job and her fever dropped to a calmer one-oh-one. She slept and I tried to relax, though easier said than done.

Yeah, she was ok, but I was really rattled. The image of her, shaking uncontrollably, was echoing in my head like an Andy Warhol film. Eventually I calmed down and came to my senses, thankful that it was merely a spiked fever and nothing more. Still, that moment of panic, that bad trip was enough to keep me on edge the rest of the day.

I thought that I was used to everything, that I’d developed a hard shell defense against such emotional chaos. Not as such.

And there was nothing to learn, no happy ending, just the knowledge renewed: life is temporary and oh so fragile and there’s really nothing I can do about it. Sure, I know where the medicine cabinet is, sure, I know some medical basics, sure, I know how to care for my kids. But that’s an incredibly thin shield against the awful horribleness that’s out there. And if I’m to be real, I admit that it scares me cold.

by Stu Mark

Photo graciously provided by * Cati Kaoe *, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved