SUPERBABY VS SUPERFLU

I like to call her SuperNuha sometimes. Especially when she was still an infant, where she yawned and stretched with one arm higher than the other, like a caped crusader ready to take off. I even made up a song for her, that goes something like “SuperNuha, likes to mandi… SuperNuha likes to mandi….” while I bathe her.

She appears to be a superkid certainly, all in her 4 1/2 months of age, always unperturbed by the occasional head bonks and tumbles and the violently animated wriggles that resulted to some self-inflicted bodily scratches and scrapes. Most people we meet will say that she’s as tough as a baby boy, if not stronger, with her steady grip, straight back and deep, intense eyes.

Alas, every superbaby has his or her rough days.

After a few days of a full blown flu bug attack, Nunu and I (yes, even yours truly suffered from the ‘saloma’ virus) are on the road to recovery.

Caring for a sick child is a real scary experience. I wouldn’t want to describe how difficult it was, for fear of launching into another tirade of unnecessary grumbles.

Let’s just say it involved a lot of unclogging a severely runny nose (two actually) and snot chasing, cleaning up pukes that came out gushing like a broken pipe, forcing colorful and syrupy drugs upon the lil one’s throat, cleaning up the sputtering syrups, washing endless piles of dirty clothes and bibs and hankys and carpet and pillow cases and …..

This is considered as an outburst already, right?

Well, I’m entitled to rant in my own blog. The experience also includes a mad dash to 7-11 for bottles of clean and pure mineral water, two mad dashes to the clinic, mad phone calls made to Grandma Doc, and mad jumps-out-of-the-bed each time she coughs forcefully.

This afternoon, I just had this sick feeling in my tummy that Nunu might still be sick, since her nappy wasn’t wet this morning when she awoke, and the nanny reported that her stool was watery yesterday. I looked up in the net and feared for the worst, that she could be dehydrated since she’s not feeding as often as she should. So we made another mad dash to the clinic, arrived at 12pm on the dot, when the doc was just about to go out for lunch.

Long story short, Nuha had a veeeery wet nappy by then, and the watery stool wasn’t a sign for diarrhea, the doc laughs. “It is diarrhea only if her bowels moved several times in a short period of time, and in her case, it was only once yesterday.”

“Then what on earth are those jelly-like substance in her poo?” I asked.

“Its her phlegm. She doesn’t know how to spit it out yet, so it comes out from the other end. Don’t worry so much, your child IS getting better. Her antibodies are fighting those viruses.”

I listened tentatively to the doc. Those magic words. She’s getting better. I imagine her fighting those supervillainous bugs, crushing them one by one under her foot. And I look down to Nunu, who’s happily playing with her socks and spit, not appearing sick at all.

My SuperNuha, indeed.