On A Red Hobby Horse: Fever

Riding a red hobby horse is that marauder of small families: fever. Each of the children have run a fever over the last two weeks, with Squealer and Scooter each going through it twice. It presented an early problem because we only possessed a very cheap thermometer, the kind where the kids must keep it under their tongues for 19 minutes before it chirps its completion. (Yes, that will work with a four year old. So you put it under their arm and add a degree, or put it in their rectum and subtract a degree. Or something like that.)

We had a tympanic thermometer that was beautiful and registered temperature after a few seconds by simply pressing a button. For reasons which remain unclear it was taken, and then left outside by one of the children. (I vaguely remember a brief snatch of conversation a few months ago involving the kids wondering “if the dogs were sick”, but the three children have remained remarkably united in their silence). In any event it was left outside.

Then it rained.

It no longer functioned and we didn’t want to drop another $40.00 on a new one when we did have the cheap digital thermometer that continued to work, albeit at a glacial pace. (And as a side note, both of these options are far better than the medieval practice of filling a breakable glass tube with deadly mercury and inserting it in a child’s mouth…now there’s a bright idea).

In any event, after Squealer developed a fever, I made the decision to purchase a new thermometer. I was immediately confronted with a new option: the temporal thermometer. With a wave of the hand, one can swipe it across the forehead of the afflicted person and it registers a temperature from the temporal artery. I had seen one of these first used in our pediatrician’s office and after some initial internet research I made the purchase.

So we got it and used it. It is about the size of an electric toothbrush (or a lean cucumber) and gives a healthy feel to the user. It makes you feel a little bit like Leonard McCoy as you scan your child’s forehead. But the best part is, it’s instantaneous, generating an immediate reading. It is particularly helpful when the kids are asleep.

The only problem is that the kids want to play with it, so we’ve had to restrict its use to humans. On several mornings, the kids have come into the kitchen and announced “I think I’m sick, can I take my temperature?” And immediately another one will yell “I’ll take her temperature. Our new rule is that if you are well enough to fight over who gets to use the medical tricorder thermometer then you must not have a fever.

So as for now, we have a new thermometer in the house. At least until the next time it rains.

In some ways the fever is the worst of the four riders. It snatches your normal electric kids and replaces them with burning, sluggish, automatons. While the fever rages they don’t move or even speak that much. Although the house is quieter, it

The worst thing about fever though is that it is often a emissary, an initial messenger, yea, a harbinger of worse things to come.

Tomorrow: Riding the Green Horse -- Vomiting