Sickness

Thank you, HamannEggs readers, for the outpouring of support for Diana’s eyeballs. She was genuinely touched by your kind words and offers to help. She is flying to New York next week to meet with a PXE expert and then to the Mayo Clinic in March to meet with other smart people. She has a fantastic outlook on her situation and almost never makes me fetch her snacks because “I’m blind.”

Now back to your regularly scheduled documentation of my failures as a parent.

After the diagnosis, we decided it was extra important for Diana’s one good eye to see some beaches, so we took the kids out of school and flew down to Mexico.

In the days leading up to our flight, Elijah was complaining he wasn’t feeling well. Like all terrible parents, we said he was a big fat faker and if he was so sick, maybe he shouldn’t watch screens.

The morning we left, our cab was set to pick us up at 5am. At 4:30am, I busied myself yelling at everyone to get their clothes on and give me your bags because what if we offended the cab driver by being 5 minutes late?

Luca, my anxiety clone, raced around checking and rechecking his bags. I popped my head into Eli’s room and Diana holding his head and looking at a thermometer.

“One oh one,” She said.

“Is that the thermometer we used to check Grover’s temp rectally?”

Eli tried to be a trooper. He put his t-shirt on grasping his bunkbed for support. I asked him if he thought he was okay enough to travel.

“I don’t think so,” he said through scratchy voice.

What to do? This trip was important. Defeatist things like “Maybe the last time she’ll see a beach” went over and over through my head. Then again, taking a sick kid on an airplane felt like a recipe for disaster. It also felt like the beginning of the movie “Outbreak.” I imagined that map of the world going red and Dustin Hoffman saying, “If only they had kept that child home!” through a bio hazard mask.

But whatevs, the beach is fun so we made him go.

Eli rallied and has enjoyed his time here in Mexico. He frolicked in the surf and ate 14 hamburgers and watched countless hours of Youtube on the AirBnB Wifi. His condition only seems to flare up when Diana and I want to eat at restaurants without hamburgers.

Plus, Diana got to see some beaches.