It's been an eventful two weeks. And I'm not even talking about *gestures vaguely* the world.
Last week, Nathaniel started daycare. A few days later, on Thursday, I had my first day of class, and Nathaniel was diagnosed with hand foot and mouth disease -- aka coxsackie. My mom says the latter name "sounds better" than "hand foot and mouth disease". I'm unconvinced. While "hand foot and mouth disease" sounds like a reason to put a cow down, I'm not sure "cock sacky" is much of an improvement.
Anyway, Nathaniel was, as is his wont, completely unbothered by any of this. But it did send him home from daycare.
On Monday I had jury service. I arrived at the courthouse, checked in, found a seat in the holding pen, and then suddenly lost all color and started sweating profusely (I mean, profusely). I stumbled over to the main desk to ask for some water, which they provided ... along with calling the paramedics because "you don't look right." Thus ended David's jury service, and began several hours at the Kaiser Westside ER. Who doesn't love beginning a jury tenure seeing one of their fellows carted out on a gurney? (I actually asked the paramedics if this happened every week -- I kind of assumed that there was always someone who was "sick" and tried to get out of jury service -- but he told me that no, I was his first jury-pool patient).
I started to feel better Tuesday, except that I started to see some weird and painful blisters on my hands. And my feet. And maybe the back of my throat. And now today, on Nathaniel's first birthday, I think "I probably have hand foot and mouth disease." It's his birthday, but he's giving me presents. What a mensch. The bonus irony is that HFMD rarely is symptomatic in adults, but I guess I'm the reason why they hedge that a bit!
So now I'm tip-toeing around the house (not to keep quiet, but to avoid the painful spots on my heels), and thinking deep thoughts like "how does the blister decide to be on that centimeter of my finger, rather than the centimeter directly to its left?" It's not like the blisters are clustered around veins or arteries, or near parts of my body that are either especially high or low use. It all seems very arbitrary. I'm very curious about tracing the physical pathway of the virus load from when it enters my body to when it manifests in blisters in these very particular spots.
Unfortunately, the medical treatment for HFMD seems to boil down to "take a tylenol and buck up", so now it's just a matter of trying to rest and waiting to see if that ambulance ride from the courthouse to the hospital results in a $94,000 surprise medical bill. What fun.