“I don’t feel good.”
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The moment I touched him, I knew he had a fever. Soon, he was vomiting. And while such symptoms have been familiar to me since his first weeks in infant day care, we hadn’t felt a fever or made a bed of towels by the toilet since the start of quarantine. Now, these ordinary childhood ailments were suffused with new terror.
We were fortunate to get a phone appointment with his doctor that morning, and a nasal swab by the afternoon. But for the 24 hours until his PCR test came back, I found myself obsessively reviewing almost every interaction he’d had in the last two weeks. Could he have shared snacks at his masked play date? Or a water bottle at backyard soccer? What happened at the birthday party his father had chaperoned?