Maura Taken Sick

Maura is generally a healthy child. Jennifer and I see that she eats her vegetables, gets adequate sleep and isn’t a couch potato. She gets the occasional cold and suffers from hay fever in the spring but she has not often been seriously ill. Last week she was.

On Monday she complained of having a cold in the morning. I took her to school anyway. She wasn’t complaining of anything that should keep her home. An hour later, though, I got a call from the school nurse to let me know she was running a fever of 102°F and I should come pick her up, which I did, right away. Children’s ibuprofen brought her fever down but it didn’t go away and she developed a cough. Since she wasn’t improving we called her doctor on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday morning he saw her and diagnosed pneumonia.

In times gone by this would have been a dangerous illness and everyone we told of it reacted as if Maura was on death’s door. Thanks to modern medicine, though, she was rapidly on the mend. A course of antibiotics treated the infection very effectively. On Thursday her fever was much reduced. On Friday it was gone entirely, and she was able to go to Rosh Hashanah services with her mother.

The most traumatic part of the whole week for Maura and for me was convincing Maura to take her medicine. She hates liquid medicine and she is very stubborn when she’s sick. Even when she knows it will make her feel better she won’t take the medicine if she doesn’t like the flavor. Since almost every children’s medicine is flavored either with grape or cherry, the two artificial flavors that Maura hates the most, she usually refuses, leaving Maura still sick and me frustrated. This time we finally hit on a solution. After it had been mixed into a banana-chocolate smoothie Maura claimed not to taste the medicine and happily drank it all down. I’m looking forward to Maura growing up just a bit more. She might not grow out of her aversion to liquid medicine but after a few more years of growth it won’t matter. She’ll be large enough to take an adult dose and she has no trouble swallowing pills.

Maura is back in school now after having been out all of last week. She seems not to have missed a beat. She is rapidly catching up with her missed school work and moving on to new material. While the extra week off hasn’t seemed to hurt her academically I hope she isn’t sick often this year. No parent likes to see his child sick but Maura being home unexpectedly causes other problems for me. Except for her aversion to liquid medicine Maura is a very good patient and not at all demanding but it’s much harder to get work done when she’s home.