I’m writing to you from a plague pit. Our baby has just caught his first cold, which means that everyone else has caught a cold, and right now it feels like the only way out of this is to get our house exorcised or just straight-up burn it down.
I shouldn’t have let this happen. I spent a couple of years as a nursery school teacher in my 20s, and this sort of thing took place all the time. A kid would come in with a slightly crusty nose, and suddenly the infection would spread like a nuclear blast. First the kid’s friends would get sick. Then their friends. Then the weird kids who spent their days whispering at Stickle Bricks. After that it’d cross over to the teachers, and we’d somehow mutate the virus and send it back to the kids, and they’d send it back to us, and our entire lives would become a nightmarish Isner-Mahut marathon of Lemsip and phlegm.
In retrospect, I should have acted when I first overheard a friend describe her baby as “a bit snuffly”. Experience should have taught me to immediately grab my son, run home, fill a plastic incubation bubble with vaporising chest rub, plunge him into it by his ankles and then pace backwards and forwards in a hazmat suit for 48 hours until a panel of medical examiners had given us the all-clear.
But I did not, and now we’re all suffering for it. Our son, to be fair, is coping better than any of us. He’s perpetually bunged up, to the point that he gasps and chokes on his milk, but he’s determined not to let it dent his unstoppable good cheer. He’s been grinning at doctors and waving at his own reflection like mad, which only makes it more heartbreaking when he’s hit by a wave of illness that he can’t quite surmount.
On the other hand, I’ve been forced to cross a dreadful Rubicon in my relationship with him. Like all dads, I’ve always said that I’d do anything for my son. But, like all dads, I didn’t actually mean it. Because one day, relatively early on, I saw my wife suck snot out of my son’s nose through a tube, and I decided on the spot that I’d never be caught doing that. Never. I vowed to spend my dying breath congratulating myself for not using any of my previous breaths to suck snot out of my son’s nose through a tube. That seemed sensible enough.
But, reader, I did it. I sucked some snot out of his nose.
Some qualifiers are probably needed here. First, I used a nasal aspirator, which has a handy little valve that stops the baby bogies from slamming against the back of your throat when you suck on it. And second, he really needed to have his nose cleared out. But still, it happened. Neither of us enjoyed it and I’m not in a rush for it to happen again. It feels like a line has been crossed, just like the time he stood up, grabbed my fingers, looked me in the eye and deliberately crapped himself.
But this is apparently what you do when your kid is ill. Until now, we’ve been able to directly solve all his problems by feeding him or changing him or putting him to sleep. But we can’t cure a cold, so we’re forced to use gruesome little stopgaps like the aspirator to help him. Let’s all just promise to forget this ever happened, and pray that I haven’t still got a column when he gets his first bout of constipation.
