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Mr. Snazzy Pants (new nick name) is sick again.  (Consequently, so am I.)  Although I don’t care much for the sensation of rattling brains and oxygen deprivation during a coughing fit, I don’t so much mind, in the sense that this ailment isn’t painful or annoying apart from the coughing.  The head and sinuses are generally clear.  There’s no aching.  No fever.  No lethargy.  There is just this deep deep cough that is mostly unproductive.  It starts from a tickle and can easily end up in a fit if one doesn’t attempt to suppress the convulsions.  My son has had all of his shots, including 4 out of 5 installments of his Pertussis vaccine.  If a coughin fit does takes place, and goes unsuppressed, it gets unpleasant, with rattled brains and oxygen deprivation, or, with my son, the inability to keep one’s dinner down.  My fits seem worse than his, because I tend to try to cough something up, and that makes it worse.  When he starts to cough, he usually stops after a few coughs, but he did get caught in a gag reflex a couple of times and ended up losing the contents of his stomach.  I haven’t seen him have any trouble breathing.  We’re waiting it out.  The medicines we’ve tried are thus far ineffective.  I’m somewhat comforted in the knowledge that we are sharing the same malady, so I know that this particular bout doesn’t physically hurt as much as other maladies we’ve contended with recently.  But I am at a loss and wracked with anxiety over the helpless and concerned feelings I have for my boy when I hear him cough.  So much so that my anxieties surface in my dreams, and I dream unpleasant and frightening dreams that make we wake up in tears. 

When I have disturbing dreams, I try to explain why I’m so upset and describe the dreams to Mr. Gadget, but rather than comfort me, he tends to get angry or annoyed with me for letting the dream, which was so vivid, shake me up.  How can you even for a moment think it’s true, he’ll say.   True to form, he responded negatively to my mumbled description of the most recent dream.  He was angry with me for sharing the unpleasantries or even suggesting the possiblity of such.  Because in this dream, our boy was hurt.  It was convoluted, as dreams so often are, because the characters morphed back and forth and forth and back.  The gist of it was we entrusted him to somebody else’s care for a period of time and he ended up being hurt in a violated kind of way during that time, and I learned of it and it was too late for me to stop it, so all I could do was be horrified that this had happened to him, and hold him and try to comfort him.  I don’t know how to describe those feelings.  I woke up in tears at the moment of awareness, when the horror hit, and before the mama bear surfaced to demand retribution of the one who had harmed my child.  Mr. Gadget, on the other hand, was awake for a few hours after that, and angry as all get out, wanting to exact retribution right then and there.  The power of suggestion.  It was just a dream, and it was horrible.  It’s comforting, in a sense, that his papa bear surfaces immediately.  It tells me he would be swift to take action should anything ever happen.  God forbid.  It’s disheartening, also, that he’s not there for me, to give me comfort.  Comfort is what I seek when I wake up sobbing from a bad dream.  It’s also disheartening that the anguish cripples me enough to wake me, so that I don’t continue with the dream and perhaps do something constructive to remedy the situation like extinguish the bad guy(s) or conquer the evil.  I don’t get to learn what I might do if the situation was not fictional.  I don’t get to find out if I would be a hero.

I can point to various aspects of any given dream and correlate them to anxieties that I harbor.  Last night I put my sweet sleepy little boy in his bed, and stayed there with him as he fell asleep.  As I was caressing his face and hair, I was thinking of how much I wanted him to be well, all well, to stop coughing, to get over this silly bug.  Do we go to the doctor, do we not go to the doctor   We just went to the doctor.  Do we go back   We’re getting better.  There’s no fever.  He’s eating.  He’s drinking.  Things are moving through fine.  He’s playing.  He’s laughing.   I’m pretty sure the doctor would say we’re doing the right thing and all we can do now is let it run its course.  I thought all these things, and I also wondered if letting this run its course would actually strengthen him somewhat and build his immune system up so that it will be stronger in the future.  I’ve heard so many times and tales of people who have compromised their immune systems by overmedicating.

Anxiety!  There’s so much at play here.  Guilt.  Guilt for not going to the doctor.  We never went as children, and sometimes perhaps we should have.  Sometimes we definitely should have.  Am I like my mother   Ack, God forbid!  It doesn’t help that Mr. Gadget will invariably make some comment in a displeased tone about me not taking him to the doctor.  It’s all on me.  Why is that