Here’s a little story with no real end to it, and maybe no point beyond the general idea that teenagers are more brittle than they think they are.
My daughter got mononucleosis over the holidays. For those who are unclear or merely fuzzy, “mono” is a viral infection that is highly contagious, but it only spreads through saliva. Thus it is “The Kissing Disease”. Beyond the general range of flu-like symptoms, the main indicator of having mononucleosis is that you sleep a lot.
Obviously, this makes it kind of hard to diagnose in teens - the major risk-group for the disease.
So my 16-year-old daughter got it and she and her mother resolutely refused to abide by the doctor’s orders to stay inside and do nothing but rest. She would still head out to the mall, or go to movies, or even go to a hockey game (as a spectator). This - to everyone’s surprise but mine, I guess - resulted in her crashing hard and her neck swelling up like a linebacker’s. My wife ended up taking her to “Urgent Care” and getting her started on a regimen of steroids that quickly got her better.
Her boyfriend – despite what I thought were fairly stern warnings from me to avoid contracting the infection – came over pretty much every day to sit with her and watch movies and play “Fortnight” on the PS4 while she recovered. He’s a pretty good kid and a bit of a jock. In the fall he plays soccer and football at the same time (he’s the kicker for the football team). In the winter he plays basketball, and in the spring/summer he does soccer again. He’s average height for a teen boy at about 5’10", but I think of him as kind of shrimpy because my daughter towers over him at 6’1".
Fast-forward a couple weeks and I take her back to the doctor for a follow-up. She’s on a “club” volleyball team with a tournament over MLK weekend, and even though she hasn’t practiced in weeks they’re begging her to play… mostly because the other girl in her position tore her meniscus earlier in the week.
No dice, says the doctor: the AMA guidelines say no sports for three to four weeks after diagnosis. The reason for this is that mononucleosis causes your spleen and liver to swell up and partially leave the protective embrace of your rib cage. That means that they are more likely to rupture if you are, say, hit by a rapidly-moving volleyball. Doc says that based on my daughter’s recovery, she’s happy to let her play after just three weeks… which will be a full week after the tournament.
We decide that we’ll head down to Richmond (the site of the tournament) and support her team even though she can’t play. This isn’t quite as selfless as it sounds: the hotel rooms were got at a reduced rate and they were non-refundable.
So we head down and spend an enjoyable day and night hanging out with the team and the other parents.
MEANWHILE, my daughter’s boyfriend is off snowboarding.
His family are big skiers and they are off at “Whitetail”, a West Virginia mountain retreat which is occasionally a ski resort if the winter is cold enough, like this year.
Later that Saturday, my daughter comes running over to us where we are watching one of the volleyball games. It turns out that Boyfriend decided to do a “trick jump” with his snowboard, but he kind of landed on his head. His sister called my daughter to let her know that they’re rushing him to a hospital because they suspect internal bleeding.
My daughter is admirably stoic in the face of crises, but she insists that we have to leave RIGHT NOW to go see him.
No, says I, we don’t know where they’re going and we wouldn’t be able to do anything but get in the way if we did. We’re staying in Richmond and we’ll monitor the situation remotely as god intended.
She calms down and we wait for further word. Eventually it comes: no fracture, no internal bleeding, “just” a severe concussion.
Later that night she’s able to talk to him via speakerphone in his hospital room. She has us on speaker too so we can all chat with him and his family.
This concussion isn’t that bad, he tells us. The pain in his spine was really bad at first; much worse than his first concussion, but that’s abated mostly. Unlike his second concussion he didn’t actually lose his sight for a few hours, on this one his vision blurred but came back fine. And the headache he has doesn’t seem to be as nausea-inducing as his other concussions - especially the fifth one back in October.
At this point I kind of had to put in my two cents. “Nick,” I say, mostly because his name is Nick, “it’s not actually a good thing to be able to compare concussions like some kind of connoisseur. I think maybe you’re doing something very wrong here.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying!” says his mother, on the other side of the connection.
So now my daughter is in romantic heaven. Her boyfriend came over to nurse her back to health with the mono, and now she gets to return the favor – he’s not allowed to watch TV or read or really even to open his eyes for too long. So she gets to sit at his bedside and READ to him for hours at a time.
I thought that meant she’d read books or maybe even poetry, but no – she reads texts from his friends and then he dictates replies.
Kids.