The creeping crud is making the rounds at our house, and it’s hit The Artist particularly hard. Last Tuesday after dinner he mentioned he might be coming down with something, because he felt “pretty crappy.”
Just to put things in perspective: this is a kid with a high tolerance for discomfort. He goes out in forty-degree weather wearing a t-shirt, not because he’s trying to be macho, but because he honestly doesn’t feel cold. He hasn’t had a sick day from school in two years. When he broke his arm as a kid, we didn’t get it x-rayed until the next day because he insisted he was well enough to spend the night at his grandparent’s house.
When this kid says “I feel pretty crappy,” this is what a normal person would classify as “I feel as though I have been run over by a truck and dragged through rough gravel and then hung up on meathooks over an open furnace.”
I kept him home the rest of the week. I’ve been dosing him with fruit juice and Nyquil, and he spent about four days mostly watching TV and dozing on the couch. Sunday he felt perky enough to play on his computer a little bit.
Last night he was coughing until after eleven, when I went in and suggested he take some more Nyquil.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m worried I won’t be able to get up for school.”
“If you can’t sleep for coughing, that’ll be just as bad,” I pointed out. “Maybe you should take one more day off to recover.”
“I don’t know how much more school I can afford to miss.”
This is the first he’s been absent all year, but he knows if he gets behind he has a lot of trouble catching up. He also worries about missing too much swim practice. So he went to school today, and swim practice. I fed him a hamburger from Hardee’s for dinner, dosed him with Nyquil, and he said goodnight and went to bed.
I remember when the kid would jump at any excuse to miss school. When did he become such a responsible young man?
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