Crazy-Making: The Prequel

The body of this post deals with events that left me feeling fiery.  As in, burning up with fever.  As in, burning with rage.  (Okay, that may be a bit strong, but "burning with irritation" sounds wussy.)  As in, the burning sensation one gets in one's sinuses when one has used too much nasal spray.  Yep, we're just burning up around here.

About a week ago, my sinuses began noting the approach of bedtime by clogging up.  It wasn't exactly a cold per se, it was more of a ... sinus thing.  The result was, I couldn't breathe through my nose, and I have to breathe through my nose if I want to get to sleep. No, blowing my nose didn't help.  And no, using nasal spray didn't help.  And no, propping up my pillows so I'm sleeping at the angle of repose didn't help, either.  I know I probably  have made things worse instead of better by using the nasal spray in the first place, because the rebound effect ensures that twelve hours after I last used it, I'm going to get stuffy again, which means I get stuffy right around the time that I desperately, longingly need to get some shut-eye, which means I have to use more nasal spray in order to sleep, but life is full of unintended ironies, isn't it?  I was determined to break the cycle of addiction or risk of finding myself sitting on a folding chair in a room full of strangers, confessing my transgressions.  After two miserable hours of lying on my stack of pillows and not sleeping, I caved.  Thus the burning sinuses.

Shortly after falling asleep, I was awoken by the pittypat of little feet wending their way to my side of the bed.  "Mahhh-mee," patpatpat, "Maaaaahh-meeee, pick me UP."  (Why is Daddy no longer allowed to pick her up and put her in our bed?  Beats me.)  As I groggily plunked her down between us, I noticed that India felt a little warm.  As in, nuclear - or, as our Prez would put it, nuculear - radiation warm.  Warm as in, "guess who's going to be taking a sick day" warm.  Ever one to look on the bright side, I hoped against hope that she was just overheated from being in long pj's and sleeping under a blanket, which she doesn't usually do, so I took off her pj bottoms and told myself she'd cool down soon.  Which didn't happen.  What did happen was that she fell into a feverish half-sleep in which she thrashed around a lot and kept jostling me out of the light doze I was working hard to turn into full-blown REM sleep.  After about an hour, I woke up enough to realize that her skin temperature was quickly headed toward "roast" and perhaps I ought to, oh, take her temperature, maybe?  It was 103.  And thus we have burning up with fever covered.

Now fully awake, but at least breathing functionally, I swing into full gear.  Thanks to the miracle of technology, I can cope with these little domestic emergencies at 1 am, instead of having to wait for an hour when sane people might be up, or the main office at school opens, right?  I spend an hour typing up sub plans, emailing them to relevant parties, making sure all contingencies are covered.  Wouldn't you know it, today's our first evacuation drill of the year!  Yeah, that's 'fire drill' to you laymen, but in this brave new age of homeland security, we now have to account for all contingencies. We have new emergency procedures that are only slightly less elaborate than Shackleton's plans to traverse the South Pole, and we have been forewarned that failure to ensure our subs are adequately prepared for a school emergency will result in, um, something serious.  Like double secret probation, or something.  So in addition to all the other burnings I've addressed, we can add "not burning up in a major conflagration."

At three a.m. I get back into bed and wait for sleep.  Sometime between getting back in bed and falling asleep, India rejoined us.  Approximately 2.9 nanoseconds after that, my alarm went off, signaling the start of a new day and a new chance to excel!, as a co-worker of mine always starts his emails.  If he weren't kidding, I'd hate him.  Anyhoo, India is clearly still feverish, so I am home for the duration.  I stumble downstairs, call the automated subfinder, and leave a message that my department chair has my sub plans.  When I return to my overcrowded bed, India is awake!  And chatty!  And restless!  None of these adjectives apply to me, given that I have had, oh, maybe six hours of sleep, with none of it coming at more than two hours at a stretch.  So I ask my life partner and better half to please take care of this kid until he leaves for work so I can just maybe sneak a few minutes' more sleep.  India, being under the weather and therefore more than normally irrational, doesn't want to leave the bed, use the potty, get changed, eat bwestfist, or do anything else, until she does, when she starts whining.  Then she lies down.  "I think she's going to go back to sleep," my spouse says in tones ringing with optimism, leaving the room to have a nice, quiet, uninterrupted breakfast downstairs.  And does she go back to sleep?  No, of course not.  What she does instead is precisely what I predict she'll do, namely, crawl on my head, grab my glasses and other sundry things off my nightstand, and ask me to get up a zillion times.  Meanwhile, because I am already in a bad mood, and I already don't feel well, I choose to wallow in my passive-aggressive fit of pique instead of hollering to Warren that he needs to come get this kid already.  I mean, helllloooooo, I didn't ask him if he thought she was going to go back to SLEEP, I asked him to TAKE THE KID.  Now burning with irritation, I give up the idea of ever getting any sleep and take myself and my fever-ridden offspring downstairs.

Still in full blown passive-aggressive mode, exacerbated by a lack of gross motor control thanks to sleep deprivation, I manage to convey some measure of my annoyance to my spouse by slamming around the kitchen until he gives up trying to be nice to me and leaves for work.  Since I'm up anyway, I figure I might as well have some coffee and quit sulking.  The phone rings.  It's my department chair.  "Um," she says, clearly puzzled, "we got your message on subfinder.  Do you want to use your emergency plans today?"  [NB: I created these emergency plans with her in preparation for The Big One - i.e., if I'm en route to the hospital contracting five minutes apart - not because I'm out with a case of the sniffles.]  "Nnnnnnooooo," I say, somewhat confused.  "I want to use the lesson plans I emailed to you."  "I don't have any email from you," she says.  She does not have my emails, nor does the school nurse, or the school secretary, or my other colleague.  They are not in the regular email, they are not in the web-based spam quarantine email, they appear to exist nowhere. 

"Whaddya mean, they're not there?" I say through gritted teeth.  I spent an hour in the middle of the freakin' night desperately scrambling to write freakin' lesson plans and they're not THERE?  With my department chair on the phone, I rush upstairs, turn on the computer, open up my email, and go to my 'sent items' folder.  There sit my cogently written, fully outlined lesson plans, time stamped as being sent on their way at half past freakin' early.  I try sending them again.  Nothing.  She adds my home email to her contacts folder.  I send again.  Nothing.  She goes to her personal yahoo account, signs in, and I send the plans to that address.  They pop up in a nanosecond.  At this point, my head blows up, leaving nothing but a ring of charred skin at the base of my throat and a wisp of smoke drifting skyward. 

Now I really am burning with rage.  Over the summer our tech department, ever fearful that someone might actually try to use technology, installed a new internet-based spam filter that lets NOTHING through.  Apparently, unless the user knows your email address, and goes through all kinds of rigamarole to add it to their "allowed sender" list, this spam filter figures you are just the kind of wily, evil person who would try to hack into NASA and refuses to acknowledge your presence.  All of this is well and fine, of course, as long as we all develop psychic powers and can tell when someone whose email address we don't know (like, oh, say, THE PARENT OF A STUDENT IN OUR CLASS) needs to contact us and pre-emptively add their email address to our allowed lists.  I swear, nothing would make the head of our tech staff happier than if we grubby non-professionals would leave the fancy machinery to the people who know what they're doing, and go back to communicating via paper memoes in interoffice envelopes, or maybe by thumping on the walls in Morse code.   Argh!

Suffice it to say, my little sniffle quickly transmogrified into the full-blown Cold from Hell I have already discussed in "Son of Crazy-Making," and our tech department sent me a stiffly worded email later that day stating that the problem with the emails must originate in my computer because they couldn't find any problem with theirs.  And there I shall leave you, dear reader, waiting for the next installment in the Crazy-Making series, namely, Crazy-Making Rides Again.

Comments

[madge]

I think your tech department needs double secret probation.

Argh. I'm burning with irritation for you. (I don't require much these days, so absorbing someone else's irritation is actually quite refreshing...)

[Julie]

I am not sure if you are still home with a sick kid, but if you need a hand, or maybe even, A REAL BREAK, please give me a buzz and we'll take the child for a while. I was sick before Duncan was born, Carson was AWOL and it was absolute hell. No one should have to go through anything like that!