The headache was deep into its third day. Dennis was sweating cold in his thick pyjamas. Slick sweat stained his sheets. Fever ravaged his body, muscles taught with pain, but the headache hurt the most. Was he dying? He decided that he didn’t care anymore. He just wanted the throbbing to stop. Every time he shivered, it made it worse. Every time the fever dreams kept him from slumber, the headache was still there. Taunting. Stabbing. Plunging deep into his brain.
A shivering spell took over and he was freezing. His mother watched from the chair as her son gathered up the extra blankets she’d brought him. She heard the chattering of his teeth, and the moaning as his system fought against the virus. He hadn’t spoken since Tuesday. Every time he tried, the shivering stopped him. He couldn’t write. An attempt was made with an iPad and that sort of worked for a few hours, but his last message was too cryptic.
DLLFIMSOCOLF (coldimsocold)
No matter how many layers of clothing she put on him, the shivering didn’t seem to stop. The doctor had suggested seeing if he could stay home because they weren’t really equipped for this at the children’s hospital. If Dennis got through the night, she thought.
The cold was burning him now. He wasn’t sure what was real beyond the pain in his head, but he was sure his fingertips were burning. He knew his mother was in the room, sitting on his old nursing chair, fully masked and gloved.
The doctors didn’t know what he had beyond that it was a virus. It was unique, unrecognized, not a coronavirus like HIV or COVID. Novel, they called it. And she hadn’t been masked or gloved three days ago when she first took Dennis in to their family doctor. “Mrs Delancey, it’s probably just the ‘flu” the nurse had said. “He’ll be right as rain in no time.”
When she took him back the second time four hours later, he wasn’t fine. But there was a COVID outbreak at Children’s, and it was too risky taking him there, the doctor said. Dennis had started shivering by then, sweating through his clothing and leaving patches on the bed in the doctor’s room.
“Mrs Delancey, Mary, I’m sorry. Get him to take the medication I’ve prescribed and he’ll at least be able to get some sleep.”
But although he had, he couldn’t. Sleep was interrupted by waking fever dreams, by imagined snakes in his mouth and fire in his skin and that infernal headache.
So she sat with her ten year old son Dennis in the fit of a viral infection and fever, one she wasn’t even remotely showing symptoms for, hoping he wasn’t going to die.
And then Dennis died. It happened quickly. The moaning stopped first, and then his breathing followed. One long sigh, and he rolled his eyes back.
Mary checked her phone for the time, and noticed the message on the screen.
“Transaction complete.”