Thursday, May 19, 2005

News of the Week

Franklin's been a little under the weather these past few days. The drooling, we took to be teething related, and it has not slowed one bit since the first one popped out. He's got four now, two up & two down. Sunday evening he began to complain about a fever. We checked and it was 38.4. It went up and down for a while, and then jumped up to about 39. When we had SARS news on the tube every minute of every day, people were not being let into any public buildings with a temperature above 38. Franklin doesn't have SARS, relax already. It was just kind of high. 39 is about 103F, for those of you who don't do metric yet.

Now, my book says that Hippocrates discovered centuries ago that fevers were good for you and that they burned out all the garbage that shouldn't be in a young person's body in the first place. The book went on to say that it wasn't necessary to go see the doctor on the first day of a fever, unless there were any of about 15 extenuating circumstances. Of which, on Sunday, Franklin had none.

Well, my wife Maggie, the mother of my son, is a brilliant woman, an angel sent down to earth to help me get through each and every day. When I'm down, she's right there with the appropriate thing to say, when I'm up, she asks me to make her some tea, and I do. And because she's usually right about so many things, I usually let her have her way, and so we ended up in the emergency room talking to a doctor who was more interested in telling me that Franklin had dry skin than finding out about how long he had had a fever.

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