The first warning shot came when the boy started coughing. As worrying as we found the minor dose he’d got, it was nothing compared to his own reaction to coughing for the first time; face twisted in a paroxysm of shock with each splutter, his pained cries replaced by a look of such affronted alarm it was almost comic. For the next three days, however, he was inconsolable; wheezing, not sleeping, and now sporting the tiny, red eyes of a stoner who’d spent a summer bank holiday staring directly at the sun.
By Monday, just as he had almost recovered, my wife and I both started feeling that telltale tickle at the back of the throat and a muddle-headed gloom about our foreheads. Before long, we had weary joints and a vague sense that every light in the house had been re-engineered to the floodlit brightness of a dental surgery. We were, it was clear, becoming drastically, and dramatically unwell.
Neither of us are good patients. As part of her commitment to gender equality, my wife was an early adopter of man flu. She’s never met a freckle she couldn’t Google into an exotic skin disease. I’m worse still: if I so much as break out in hives, I’m ready to dictate instructions for my burial – a tasteful ceremony within the centre circle of Anfield, my body made up to look like one of the Na’vi from Avatar.
Within hours, we were sick together and trapped in a vicious, snotty cycle of damp tissues, snarled disagreements and a bewildering cocktail of sprays, salves, tablets and drops. We withdrew from society like a plague colony trading by placing coins in vinegar on the edge of town, although admittedly in our case this just meant doing our veg shop online.
Then, the fresh hell of Parent Flu dawned on us; the truth is – and even as I write, I can barely believe how unfair it is – we didn’t get a day off from raising our baby just because we were ill. Certainly, the boy came out of the whole thing quite badly, refusing to mind himself even for a bit. By Wednesday, we were both separately fantasising about being hospitalised, since it would decide, once and for all, which of us was sickest with the added bonus that the other would have to do literally all the parenting.
By Saturday we were finally on the mend, but not before a tetchy, sleepless 48-hour period in which we stopped judging our baby for refusing to look after himself, resenting his reluctance to look after us instead. As we emerged back into the land of the living on Sunday, we felt assured we have what it takes to survive a bout of ill health in future. Our son must have agreed, since he took one look at us and launched into a fresh parcel of snotty, coughing sobs. We were not impressed. I mean, everyone gets sick; does he have to be such a baby about it?
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
