I could not sleep last night. Why? My five year old son Michael was in pain and I felt responsible. For some reason, I had convinced myself that I was the cause of his neck pain. It was not because I was being a “pain in the neck” either. Rather, it was because I recently started a new workout program. (I will tell you more about that on a later post.) One of the new exercises was a sit-up styled one. Michael likes to call himself my “personal trainer”. Sometimes that entails encouragement. At other times, it means that he tells me what he “thinks” that I am doing wrong and he sometimes joins me in kiddie versions of my exercises. For the life of me, I could not remember whether or not Michael had attempted the sit-ups on the day that he started complaining about having neck pain. In the absence of memory, I assumed the worst – that I had not noticed him trying to do the sit-ups and that was definitely why/how he strained his neck/was in tear-inducing pain. Bad mommy.
Did I mention that logic goes out of the window when I am being overly emotional? See, if I were being logical, I would have questioned the other symptoms: the fever, the loss of appetite and the lethargy. Then…in the early hours of the morning, my mind went in another direction…meningitis! Did someone mention meningitis? (FYI: When you are operating on little to no sleep, it is not the best time to check one of those online symptoms/medical diagnosis type sites.) Let’s just say that daylight and the accompanying visit to the doctor could not come quickly enough.
To shorten a long story…Michael is fine. His neck hurts because his lymph nodes are swollen. The other symptoms were because of a common, sinus-related infection. After taking a couple of medications, he will be back to normal. For the record: there is no neck strain from the exercise and there is no meningitis. I wonder how much longer I will be able to use the “What can I say? I’m a mom…” line. Oh well, at least I will be able to sleep peacefully tonight.