Sick E. Cheese

I had a hunch something was brewing when I picked Jayna up from preschool yesterday … and I was right.

Normally, when she comes out of the school and spots me, she screams my name gleefully and runs into my arms—you know, the same thing most people do when they see me.

Yesterday, she lethargically plodded down the walkway toward me with nary a peep, and quietly put her head on my shoulder when I scooped her up.

During the drive from the school to our daycare provider’s house, she almost drifted off to sleep. When we arrived, I carried her in and told Mrs. Daycare Provider that she was acting a bit out of sorts.

“She’s probably just tired,” I said hopefully, but not convincingly.

When Wonder Woman picked her up a few hours later and brought her home, she seemed a bit better, thanks mostly to the nap she took that afternoon.

But at 2-o’clock-ish this morning, I woke to the sound of pitiful whining emanating from The Sleep-Depravation Torture Device—I mean, the baby monitor—so I stumbled out of bed, bounced off a couple of walls and doorways, and jogged upstairs to her room.

“My throat hurts,” she said in a heart-wrenchingly pathetic and whiny voice.

“Do you want some juice?” I asked her.

“Nooooo,” she whimpered.

And then I fainted and died. Because Jayna? Jayna does not turn down juice. Doesn’t happen. In fact, she begins the day asking for juice, spends the day periodically asking for more juice, and ends the day asking for “last juice.” And between all of that, she also frequently requests juice. If the question “Can I have some more juice?” was a tire, the tread on Jayna’s would be as bald as Howie Mandell.

I feared the real Jayna might have been bodysnatched, but at death-o’clock in the morning, I was content to let the aliens have her—especially when the impostor in her crib, after a brief bit of whimpering, fell back to sleep.

At 3:30-ish, more whining and crying leapt from the speaker and smacked us about the head. Wonder Woman answered the call this time, and returned to bed a few minutes later, which was good, because it gave her and I just enough time to almost get back to a semi-sleep-like state before Jayna kicked it up a notch, screaming in a most shrill and ear-piercing fashion that her throat hurt (a throat that I am sure was in no way aided by the shrill and ear-piercing screams she was using it to create). I suggested to Wonder Woman that she bring Jayna into our bed, and that I would go sleep on the couch. She concurred.

She returned, holding in her arms a distraught Jayna. The two of them were standing in the doorway to the bedroom, and I was next to them in the hall. And that’s when Jayna’s crying and whimpering suddenly morphed into The Sound.

Any parent reading this knows The Sound. It’s that guttural, contorted, hollow, demonic noise that, for a split second, makes the hopeless optimist in you think, “Hmmm, maybe that’s just a weird cough,” but you know it’s not a cough, not unless your child has been possessed by Satan, and Satan just so happens to have a chest cold. No, The Sound serves one purpose, and that is to announce that The Puking Shall Now Begin.

When I heard The Sound, I could do nothing more than stand there and hope that Wonder Woman would react by whisking Jayna into the bathroom and aiming her toward a tile or porcelain surface. Unfortunately, it was 4 o’clock-ish, and WW’s brain was not fully engaged. She froze like a deer in the headlights, and paid dearly for it.

“Get in the bathroom! Get in the bathroom!” I said with a not-so-subtle hint of annoyance. (I’m very helpful at times like this, because whenever I see someone handling a crisis in a manner that is different from how I would handle it—you know, the right way—I know that the best thing to do is to act all pissy about it while semi-taunting the crisis-mishandler into changing course.)

Oops. Too slow.

The vomit was of the projectile variety, and it hit WW squarely in the right upper-chest and collarbone region—which, unfortunately, was where an ample amount of her hair had been resting. Now contaminated, she opted to just step into the tub with Jayna still in her arms and endure a couple more heaves.

Moments later—and after dual utterings and/or silent mouthings of the word “fuck” roughly 6,000 times—I lay on the bed with Jayna while WW took a pre-dawn shower. She then crawled in bed with Jayna and I retired to the couch, where I fruitlessly pursued sleep for a couple of hours. When Zan—who miraculously slept through the entire ordeal—rose shortly after 6 a.m., I got up and sat with him and Jayna for a while so WW could get at least a few minutes of sleep.

By the 8-o’clock hour, Jayna had us fooled into thinking the bug had passed, and was imploring WW to let her go as planned to her gymnastics class, and from there to daycare. The subsequent half-dozen vomiting incidents that took place throughout the day made it clear that opting to keep her home was the correct—albeit inconvenient—move. Thus, much of my day was spent manning The Bowl.

And it is, I am quite sure, no coincidence that this illness arrived just a few days after Jayna and Zan’s latest visit to Chuck E. Cheese, whose rodent headquarters are the restaurant-and-playhouse equivalent of a giant, virus-filled petri dish.

With any luck, Wonder Woman, Zan and I will steer clear of the bug, and—oh, hell, who am I kidding? We don’t need luck; we need friggin’ a miracle. Stay tuned.