When illness strikes the Ferrier house, my mother is always the last to find out.
In fact, she often learns that one of us is suffering from pus-filled bumps and a fever of 106 by reading this very blog.
And she doesn’t like that very much.
“I’m your mother,” she lamented over the phone in the midst of our pneumonia debacle a few months back. “I shouldn’t be finding these things out at the same time as the rest of the world.”
I don’t have the heart to tell her (face to face, anyway) that I have one good reason for keeping her in the dark. Like all moms, she worries too much. And so a phone call that begins with me telling her that the baby has pink eye is likely to end with her dire warning that we all need to head to our nearest emergency room, because it sounds like a case of the bubonic plague. And she knows this because she saw it on Oprah. And also? She got an e-mail forward about it.
Case in point: Last weekend.
My parents came to visit on the same day that I came down with a horrible chest cold. It had followed on the heels of three straight weeks of strep throat, so to say I was worn down was a major understatement.
“I’m worried about you,” Mom said as I coughed and hacked through one of our conversations.
“Yeah,” I wheezed. “Catching a cold after strep is the pits.”
“I’m worried it’s something more serious,” she said quietly, touching my arm. Tears formed in her eyes. “Far more serious,” she added in a broken voice.
An uncomfortable silence followed. I half-expected strains of the theme song from Terms of Endearment to begin playing in the background.
After a brief moment of panic as I realized I hadn’t even bothered yet to choose music for my funeral, I remembered that I had caught this supposedly fatal chest cold from my kids. They seemed to be recovering just fine.
At least, I thought so. Mom wasn’t so sure.
“There he goes again,” she said, gazing mournfully at Bruiser as he played in the den.
“What?” I asked.
“He just tugged on his ear,” she said. “That’s the second time he’s done that since I’ve been here.”
“Yeah, he does pull on his ears sometimes,” I said.
“Lindsay,” my mom said wearily, shaking her head. “That’s the sign of an ear infection, you know.”
