Fever

Aug 1st, 2:40am, Randall woke up in the middle of the night. The ear thermo read 39.5°C! I got anxious. And that marked the start of two days at the emergency, three sleepless nights, and many unfinished meals. No other symptoms and the fever went up to 40.5°C the other morning after the medicine wore off. But all of a sudden the fever was gone, even more dramatically than the way it came. The doctors at the pediatrics emergency had tried to convince us that it was most likely some viral infection that we didn’t have to worry about. Now they proved to be absolutely right: red spots came out on his face and his neck and then spread to his tummy – it was Roseola, a common viral infection in young kids under 2 years.

Aside from the information about Roseola, we got another printout from Dr. Burke, the child’s pediatrician, which was the scientific facts about fever. It was a good one, to beat all the myths we had once had or had once been told by our own parents. However the best part of all these days is something I remember from the emergency room, a doctor saying to us (though sounding a little tired and impatient): “You can’t protect your child from virus. He’ll go to school. He’ll play with other kids…” That’s so true about everything, not only virus.