Benjamin woke up several times throughout the night. At 5am he took a hot bath and asked for Kytril. At 7am, he did the same thing. I couldn’t give him another dose yet. I tried to help him with other options. “Stop talking please,” he said. He needed to go inward. When he went back to bed, he said he hurt all over.
I think Benjamin has a classic back to school cold, and his tummy hurts from his nightly chemotherapy. But my brain started racing again. I thought of something my new counselor told me last week, a tool to keep me grounded in gratitude: finding the vav.
Vav, pronounced vah, is the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the Hebrew language, vav connects things, kind of like the English but. There is a vav in many of the Psalms to signify a shift in thinking, from lament and worry to gratitude and hopefulness. Finding the vav, the shift from worry to gratitude, is hard work, but so necessary. I shifted my thinking. I brewed an early pot of coffee in the silent Sunday house, and started to knit.
Benjamin seemed to feel better as the morning turned to midday, but in the afternoon, he developed a fever. Our first thermometer reading was 100.5. An hour and fifteen minutes later and it was 100.3. Technically, I was supposed to call the clinic; 101 is the “take him to the ER” temperature, but they like to know about it if we see readings of 100.3 or higher taken over an hour apart. I decided to wait and take it again an hour later. It was 99.9. That’s better. Just before Benji fell asleep for the night, I took it one more time–100.6. Wrong direction. I will monitor him throughout the night, but I decided not to call, and to let him sleep. We are leaving in the morning for All Children’s anyway. A full night of sleep can do wonders.