After a brief interlude during a trip back to Ireland, the boy’s sickness has returned with a vengeance. We were called by the childminder to come and pick him up, because he’d been sick again. It was worse this time, and our sense of distress was enhanced by the indignity of false hope, since our trip home had proved mostly painless. He now had a high temperature and a cough that could strip paint. The minor hardship we’d experienced the week before appeared to have been little more than an hors d’oeuvre.
My natural refuge in any time of stress is the internet – eg five minutes ago when I couldn’t spell ‘hors d’oeuvre’ and Googled ‘hrouresdearveses’ – but this seemed like a better candidate for good old-fashioned, face-to-face doctoring. Besides, my wife and I are incapable of searching my son’s symptoms without concluding he has coronavirus, so we thought it best that a professional decide.
I raced him to the doctor, not so much out of urgency but because our appointment coincided with a torrential downpour. All of which he found so exciting he’d forgotten he was ill by the time we arrived. This was not the ideal moment for me to be flustered and damp, and for him to be alert, smiling, and conspicuously lacking the cough he’d had for the previous 12 hours.
I was confronted with a weird sense of annoyance that my child seemed better. Some part of you fears the doctor will think you’re lying or, worse, are one of those overbearing TV parents, cradling a perfectly healthy child and demanding someone donate an entire hospital ward to his care. ‘Come on,’ I thought to myself, my brave little soldier acting altogether too brave for my liking. ‘Give us a few coughs, that’s a good boy.’
Luckily, this is not how medicine actually works, and my doctor discerned the problem with that unshowy confidence they always have. I revert to childhood around doctors, happy for them to take control, to relinquish my adulthood entirely. I envy this of doctors most of all – to be an adult, a real adult, one who never Googles their ailments (or ‘ourrsdeoeurvs’), who spends their days helping people, putting them at ease, and in their downtime, doing that thing where they push themselves backwards on a wheeled chair so they can get something out of a sliding drawer behind them. There are, I’m sure, aspects of medical life that are less fun. It’s just I lack the imagination to consider them when I’m face to face with someone who gets to have a life-sized plastic skeleton in their office.
In the end, he diagnosed my son with mild croup and not the coronavirus I had promised myself I wouldn’t talk about, but ended up mentioning several times. My son got a sticker, tried to eat it, and began crying as I fastened it to my own shirt instead. ‘Come now, you’ve been a very brave boy,’ the doctor said. ‘Thank you,’ I replied, ‘I have, haven’t I?’
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
