Lifelines: Of Honeysuckle and Sepsis

This is strange, I thought. Maybe I should take him to the doctor now.

Photo: Shutterstock

It was the day of the Big Pesach Shopping. I was standing in my kitchen unloading bags upon bags of potato starch sugar oil onions and various other Pesach staples. Earlier that day I had taken 11-month-old Eliyahu who was sick with me to the supermarket and I had stocked up on all the non-perishables we would need for Yom Tov which was ten days away.

I had already cleaned out the cabinets and pantry to make room for the Pesach items, but the counters and table were not yet Pesachdig, so when I came home from the supermarket, I lined those surfaces with garbage bags so that I could unpack the groceries onto them.

Eliyahu was still sitting in his stroller, lethargic from the fever that he’d had for the past three days. I wasn’t particularly concerned, because Eliyahu was the type of baby who came down with fever every few weeks; he’d been on antibiotics close to a dozen times in his young life, mostly for ear infections. Pesach cleaning notwithstanding, I knew that after three days of fever, taking him to the doctor was the responsible thing to do. So that morning, I had called the local clinic and made an appointment for five p.m.

At 2:30 in the afternoon, as I was unpacking the bags, I noticed that Eliyahu looked weird. His limbs kept jerking involuntarily — first his arm flailed to the side, then his head bobbed up and down, then his knee jumped.