Her crying finally stopped a few minutes before midnight.
She woke earlier with a wail, gulping and panicked, unable to breathe or talk properly. I took her into the bathroom to the toilet and calm down. I knelt upon the tiles, she blew hot, infection-riddled complaints upon me: she hurt, she was sick. Her hand upon my chest burned like a branding iron.
Adam came, we looked at each other: hospital? We weren’t sure. She’d not been like this before; we were novices. But the Nurofen finally kicked in and Keira and I went back to lay down again.
Do you want a story?
She nodded.
Harry Potter?
I reached for the book by her bed.
No. Something else.
Her shoulders still trembled from the sobbing.
So I told a quick story from my childhood, about my white persian cat, Snowflake, and my sister’s pet goldfish. It didn’t have a happy ending, I realised partway through, and I scrambled around for an alternate ending, or at least an ambiguous one, but it didn’t matter. She was already asleep.
Sleep had claimed her again and all we heard for the rest of the night was her rattled breathing, struggling to find its way in and out of her lungs. I checked her once more, I did not rest easy. Her face was still blotched from fever and distress; I could trace the slicks of sweat with a finger.
*
They both have croup this week; Keira copped a worse case. They’ve both been home with barking coughs and temperatures.
This is post number fifteen hundred. 1,500!
I’m not too sure what the next fifteen hundred will bring. After all, this is nearly five years of blogging worth of posts. Technically, I’ve written more. I’ve deleted a few over the years about books that I panned or disliked without a properly balanced, considered review backing up my opinion. They were from my early days and were embarrassing.
If I were to look at more of my posts in a critical light, I’m certain I would find more I’d rather delete. I won’t. Personal blogs are about the person and a person cannot be perfect. I can try and make my writing better, yes, but I’m still (!) finding my way around this space, experimenting, succeeding, and failing.
It’s scary. It’s also exciting.
healthy child (last week)
unwell child (yesterday)
