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The first positive coronavirus test in our home occurred on October 26, and at first we were fools who believed it would all be over quickly. My husband was isolated in the basement; maybe the rest of us would be safe. Five days later, I tested positive. Then our preschool-age daughter did. Then our little boy was diagnosed with RSV, which turned into a terrible cough, which turned out to be pneumonia.
After 20 days stuck at home together, during which time my kids started referring to their Pedialyte popsicles as “popsicles” because they’d watched 4,000 episodes of “Peppa Pig,” my son was finally back in daycare. He lasted two full days before contracting a new virus, this one accompanied by the sudden appearance of hideous red welts all over his body, sending him to the ER just before midnight. For three weeks, we had gone from bad to worse to Biblical.
Wasn’t this year supposed to be better? (Or was it something we told ourselves as we limped toward the fading mirage of normalcy?) Instead, the onslaught of viruses this fall has been so monstrous and relentless that it seems like every parent I know: friends, colleagues, neighbors, all the world – has a story say. These are not good stories. These are stories told in a clearly weary but frantic tone, and they always present specific, memorized numbers: the exact degree of fever, the count of days missed from school and work, the frequency of visits to the pediatrician or urgent care. or the emergency room.
“I have a 5-year-old and an 8-year-old who started kindergarten and third grade, respectively, the first week of September,” says Alexis McGrath of Parsippany, NJ, who described her family’s experience via email. . “Since then, there has literally not been a single week where at least two of us haven’t been home sick.” So far, the siege has encompassed three upper respiratory infections, numerous high fevers, unrelenting congestion and two confirmed cases of conjunctivitis, she says. “I. AM. SO. TIRED.”
Covid-19, flu and RSV cases are colliding, raising concerns about a possible “triple epidemic”. This is what you should know. (Video: Mademoiselleosaki)
Kate Kearns wrote to me from her bed, where she was spending her flu day 7: “My 3-year-old is napping next to me, radiating heat with a temperature of 102 and moaning softly,” she says. “We have only had two or three weeks since the beginning of September where both children were in school/preschool for the entire week.”
“Last week was Langston’s first full week of school in the month of November,” says Jonathan Freeman-Copppage, who lives in Delaware with her husband and 7-year-old son, who returned from school with the flu a few weeks ago. . behind. “It took 24 hours and three pharmacies to find your antibiotic.”
“I’ve been in the office about 10 times in the last two months, just twice in November,” Kelly Trout of McLean, Virginia told me. Her family of four, including a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old, have been sick virtually non-stop since October 4; her daughter came home from school the week after Thanksgiving with a fever of 102 degrees and tested positive for the flu. Trout says she was resigned: “I’m pretty sure we all have it.”
What is happening to us? If, like me, she has explored the Internet through bloodshot eyes as she listened to her son’s cough all night, she already knows that the information available is neither entirely clear nor particularly reassuring. This year’s “triple epidemic” – the feared collision of covid, RSV and flu – is unprecedented in recent history, its origins mysterious, possibly attributed to “immune debt” or “viral interference” or the way in which the masses have changed their behavior through the course of the pandemic.
Whatever the precise convergence of causes, the result is a full-blown public health crisis and the worst flu season in more than a decade. Hospitals are overwhelmed, antibiotics and fever-reducing drugs are in short supply, and parents, who have already been running on smoke for years, have been reduced to tears and torrents of 3am texted curses, when another thermometer reading confirms another fever. My dear friend and I once messaged about weekend plans; now our threads look like the End of Days.
After my son developed hives, I took him to the pediatrician for his fourth visit in three weeks. The nurse told me, in a vaguely distressed voice, “I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. I’ve got never, I have never seen a fall like this.” This didn’t make me feel any better, precisely because no one wants to live in the Redux Middle Ages, but it helped me take it less personally: knowing that ours was not the only family struck down by an incessant barrage of plagues, that this was not an accusation of our personal hygiene or a sign that we had been cursed by a witch.
Lexa Lemieux, a mother from Bethesda, Maryland, told me she had similarly dark thoughts as she gathered with friends and family at a lake house for Thanksgiving. Her family had recently recovered from covid, but she took her 4-year-old daughter with a runny nose to the pediatrician before the holidays just in case, wanting to make sure she wasn’t a risk to her friend’s baby. she. Everything seemed fine at first, but then: “We all started dropping like flies,” says Lemieux. “Everyone was coughing. Several of us were vomiting. The baby screamed all night. One of my friends completely missed Thanksgiving dinner. My mother, who had driven to join us for a few days at our vacation home, immediately fell ill. The trip was dubbed Thanksgiving of the Damned. We began to wonder if the house was located at the portal of hell.
Dealing with back-to-back infections is overwhelmingly stressful and exhausting, at the best of times; at its worst, especially for parents of medically vulnerable children or those without the privilege of a flexible workplace, it’s downright scary. Meanwhile, even in the midst of tripledemia, infants and preschoolers continue to be plagued by the usual icky miseries: impetigo; hand, foot and mouth; lice; roseola: a litany of ailments that look and sound like they belong in a Dickensian orphanage. Add to this mess the horror of not knowing if you’ll actually be able to get children’s Tylenol, Motrin, or amoxicillin, and of course, the parents gasp.
When, please, can we take a break?
Kearns points out that the old rules don’t seem to apply: in the old days, you could usually count on a couple of weeks (or at least days) of good health between illnesses; it seemed possible to tell whether a child was coughing because of a new bug or a persistent one. “Now it’s constant,” says Kearns. “Is completely [expletive] unhinged.” When Lemieux was crouched in the bathroom, violently ill at the start of her flu, she says she yelled out loud, to no one: “BUT WE ONLY I HAD COVID!”
Despite this chaos, there is still work to be done, children to care for, the unremitting demands of daily life. Parenting means constantly looking for the positives, and so far I’ve identified two: 1. Sick kids can be uncharacteristically calm and comfortable, which is sweet if they’re not. also nasty; and 2. If society falls apart, and the resurrection of art and culture depends entirely on the memories of “Fahrenheit 451”-style bums who have memorized certain works, I am fully prepared to dictate “Enchantment” frame by frame.
Now the winter holidays are fast approaching, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending that everyone start wearing a mask again, and people keep telling Lemieux, “At least you had all of this before Christmas!” This is meant to be optimistic, but she hears it as an ominous omen: “I want to knock on wood right away and light some sage.”
Her words reminded me that my sister-in-law actually gave me a bunch of sage, as a joke, after our recent illness. I thought about how my son had started coughing again this week and looked at the sage. “Why not?” I thought, then I turned it on and waved it. And then I inhaled the smoke and started coughing. And he kept coughing. It’s been an hour and I’m still coughing, but it’s just the salvia. He is the wise one, right?
Source: news.google.com