I vacuumed.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I vacuumed.

We knew last night that something wasn’t quite right about the bug bite on the side of Emilia’s face. It was a little swollen, a little bruised. We debated what to do. It was late, the clinics and pharmacies were closed, and it didn’t look that bad. A bad allergic reaction would be pretty immediate, right? It wouldn’t be a slow swell, right? I wrung my hands and worried; my husband soothed: we’ll check on her in the night. We don’t know that it’s an allergic reaction. We’ll check; she’ll be fine.

We didn’t check.

When my husband went to rouse her this morning, he found a nearly unrecognizable child, a wee thing with a swollen and misshapen face, her cheek and neck grotesquely bloated, her right eye a purple, bulbous slit. My heart stopped.

And then – while my husband gathered clothes and prepared to hustle us all out the door to the hospital – I vacuumed.

I told myself, the floor is dirty and that’s just not helping things. The floor is dirty and it should be cleaned. Somebody needs to do this. Somebody needs to be on top of these things. Somebody needs to pay attention to these things. I told myself, the floor is dirty, it’s dirty, just do this, now.

Because the floor was dirty. But more because I couldn’t look at Emilia without my heart stopping, because I couldn’t speak without berating myself, without berating us, for not getting help for her last night, because I all could do was do something, anything, that felt like it might make some minute bit of difference in the universe. Because my little girl was sitting there, clutching her Toady, whimpering a little, asking why is my eye shut, Mommy? and because I knew that if I hugged her again, I would cry.

And I didn’t want to cry. So I vacuumed. And now my floor is clean.

But my cheeks are still streaked with tears.

Emilia is going to be okay. She had a bad allergic reaction to a bug bite, and the good news is that antihistamines are bringing down the swelling and returning her poor face and neck to normal. The bad news is, we don’t know what bit her, and so we don’t know what she’s allergic to.

And no, I didn’t take a picture. I thought about it, once I’d calmed down enough to stop vacuuming. But I didn’t. I don’t want to remember it. It was horrible. She looked horrible. I’m still sorting through my feelings about that – my heartbreak not only at her pain, but at the fact that her outer beauty had been so distorted – but I do know that I’m not keen to revisit them. I wouldn’t have shared the picture, anyway, so. So.