Night Chills and Sweats

My husband came down with the flu yesterday, right about bedtime. He slept alone in the college kid’s room but came rushing in—right when I was eating a dark chocolate caramel from The Caramel Queen and watching the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” episode from Sex and the City—looking for his plaid flannel jammers and extra blankets.

“I’m freezing, I’m freezing,” he cried out, in the voice of the wicked witch just after Dorothy throws water on her. I get the West Virginia quilt Aunt Mary got us for our anniversary and the other patchwork I bought for $3.99 at Goodwill.

“I’m freezing, I’m freezing,” he says, shivering. I run downstairs and turn up the thermostat to 68 degrees after a warm weekend with it mostly off. I grab the down lap quilt from the basket and bring that to throw on top of him, too. Now he looks like a mythical mass under that mound of patched fabric—my own Fisher King. I tell him I’ll shut the door to that little room to keep the heat in.

Throughout the night I hear him moan and cough. I remember in college when he had both knees scoped at the Mayo Clinic. He knew I’d be his only visitor after surgery. When I came into his room he was moaning and calling out, “Come here, just kiss me, just kiss me,” but was reaching out to a set of nurses and not me. He tells me he has a hard time coming out of anesthesia. He drove this old car at the time that was full of dents and was deteriorating month by month. The gas foot pedal had broken off and he had rigged a screwdriver to a rope and tied it to the accelerator, and you pulled up on this makeshift handle to get speed; the whole thing jimmied like a flapper if you took it over 45 mph. When it was time to go home I drove out on the curvy Highway 14 in bluff country but pulled over after about ten minutes of this chitty-chitty bang-bang stuff and slammed out the front door, telling him “You’re driving us home.” Pity the fool with two patchwork knees, a wreck of a car, and a stubborn girlfriend to boot.

And then I remember when he went in for his vasectomy. I was up at the lake place with my father, and my mother stayed at my house to help with the kids. She accompanied my man to the clinic for his procedure. She got nervous driving downtown—which she always does, even in sleepy downtown St. Paul—and made him drive back home after he was snipped. When I called home later she handed the phone to him. He told me she had had no sympathy--he was on the recliner and she had thrown him a sack of frozen peas for his sore crotch.

So I’m not the best nurse and I can’t say I come from a particularly nurturing family, but I’m trying to do better.

About 2:30 a.m. my 13-year-old son bolted into my room. He was scared and whispered to me, “Mom, I can’t sleep. I’ve been hearing voices outside my room all night. It sounds like there are people down below, trying to get into our house.” I wondered how long he had stayed awake in bed, petrified. He must have been hearing his father’s flu moans—otherwordly coming out from under the door and all those old quilts. Like the ghost of Christmas future.

I told him he could crawl in bed with me if he wanted. I never do that but I was too tired to get up myself and soothe him. I gave him half the covers and then he promptly rolled over taking all of them to his side. A few minutes later, when I could tell he wasn’t sleeping, I suggested he try sleeping up on his top bunk and that I’d tuck him back in. He took my pillows, walked down to his room, and climbed up to his top bed.

So I crawled back into my now cold bed, sans pillows, and my husband comes into the room again, groaning and dripping from the night sweats, and tells me to leave the door to his room open, he was practically suffocating in there.

Good God. They tell me this is what menopause will be like. I’ll just call last night a practice run.