I race to the nursery to pick up my daughter. According to her minder, she has ‘sticky eyes’ and I jaunt from Soho to Walthamstow to remove her from the group.
Conjunctivitis is an annoying eye infection that is relatively minor, moderately disgusting, and highly infectious. I am thrown back into the high-octane paranoia of the lockdown era, arriving to find she has been happily sequestered from her friends, in an attempt to contain her nascent plague.
Part of me wonders why this is one of those infections that’s so minor but so dangerous at once, but I reckon it’s best not to overthink it, since I am one of the few human beings who did not exit the lockdown with an associate degree in armchair virology.
Nursery workers help us keep distance by standing between the children and myself, on the understanding that I’d ordinarily think nothing of grabbing each of their eyeballs in turn and giving them a good rub. No such fun this morning. No, today I must Stay Home, Stay Safe, Save Eyes.
We traipse the short walk to the house, she miserable, me tense. She rubs gunk out of, and into, her eyes and I settle in for at least a day of clearing my work schedule and sequestering myself from people with children. I hold her on my chest and position myself with wipes at arm’s reach. The latter are essential, as her eyes and nose ooze snot at all times, like suds from a squeezed sponge. I don’t want to overdo the imagery on this. You may be eating, or contemplating having a child, and I fear going into much more detail might pause either plan for some time. But let’s just say that applying pressure to any part of my daughter’s head right now would be like forcefully gripping a welly filled to the brim with green custard. Again, best not to think about it.
Within an hour, she is comfortable and my clothes are ruined; my shoulders, arms and lap all laminated with a patina of mucus, laid like a snail’s trail anywhere she’s rested her sleepy face. The sleepiness is, at least, one benefit to this ordeal, since she lolls her comically large head in fitful bursts of slumber aversion, but spends most of the hours after I pick her up in and out of consciousness.
We have eye drops which she hates, and a warm cloth which she loathes. My time is spent scrubbing away the disjecta that continuously accumulates, carefully wiping at eyelashes which keep matting together in the manner of a cow’s tail. I evidently never do this carefully enough, and she reacts every single time as if I’m using sandpaper to rub bleach into her eyes.
We continue this throughout the following two days, and she appears to come round to the routine. As the infection wanes, she is much more like her happy self as we drop her back some days later, bushy tailed and – more importantly – bright eyed. She is welcomed warmly by her friends, and a mixture of exhaustion and relief causes me to rub my eyes myself, wincing slightly as I do so. Probably nothing, I think as I walk away. Best not to overthink it.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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