"Mom, whenever I get sick, you start saying how lucky we are!"
Sam, the kid who never gets sick, has been through it these last few weeks. First, difficulty breathing at night; now he takes allergy meds every night. Next, his eyes become so inflamed he looks like Linda Blair; weeks of antihistime eyedrops followed by steroids finally clear it up. The final straw, severe abdominal pain in the middle of the night, the on-call nurse mentions surgery and suddenly everything is scary ... until we find out it's "only" constipation caused by dehydration. Five days later, he's fine.
So why are we lucky? We're lucky my sister could come over in the middle of the night so I didn't have to wake Emma Jane to go to the hospital. We're lucky to have health insurance to pay for the thousands of dollars in medical treatments we've received. We're lucky Rich was planning to take this week off anyway to spend with the kids. We're lucky to have jobs where we can legitimately take sick time to care for a child. We're lucky Sam wasn't born 150 years ago, in which case he would likely be blind or dead by now. And, we're lucky not to be among the several families we saw in the emergency room, whose babies are in surgery or receiving morphine drips at 1 a.m. on a Thursday night.
So no, Sam, I'm not glad you haven't been feeling so great lately. I'm sorry about that. But yes, I do feel lucky.
