The most beautiful noise:

Our son not coughing.

He’s going to a highly-regarded preschool right around the corner, but no amount of esteem for an institution can keep childhood illnesses from blowing through the student body like a Cat 5 hurricane. Last month, it was some creeping crud that left the kids feverish for a couple days then with a graveyard cough for weeks afterward.

And of course, the school never lets you know: Watch out for the following symptoms because every child here is sick as a dog. I guess for them, it just comes with the territory. Fuck it, they aren’t their kids...

So when The Boy was sent home with a fever on a Tuesday at lunch time several weeks ago, we kept him home the rest of the week as a precaution. The fever broke and he started to bounce back … except for that cough.

So last week, we sent him back to school. But he was still not right. He wasn’t himself. He may not have been running a fever, but goddammit, he was not well yet, either.

So after a whole week of him zombie-ing around the house, big red rings encircling his eyes, coughing, and begging to go to bed at 6:30 or 7pm, I got pissed and made a same-day doctors appointment for him this last Monday. His coughing jags were so bad they were ending in groans of pain. He sounded like the world’s tiniest little old man. The doctor gave him a quick going over, spotted an infection in his ear that typically follows his bouts with fever and prescribed the anti-cootie juice that usually fixes him right up.

I drove him home, promising him that as soon as we got this medicine he’d start feeling better and coughing less. And he believed me because I am his Daddy and I’ve never been wrong in my medical prognoses before.

We got the stuff that night, dosed him, and by the next morning, well, his cough was even worse. The rest of symptoms went away pretty quickly, but the cough persisted. We put a humidifier in his room at my suggestion, so his nights passed relatively comfortably, but come about 5:30 am, the deep, wracking coughs would begin again, waking everybody up and making us all miserable.

I’d sit him down on the couch next to me, my arm around his back as he pushed in close to me, and when he coughed, it felt against my arm like a bag of small rocks being tumbled around inside his chest. And every day, he continued to not get better.

Finally, Wednesday morning of this week, I asked the preschool lady about his cough, and she (off-handedly) reported that all the kids had been getting it and it lasted for weeks. There you go. Your son is going to cough his throat raw and his lungs sore and that’s just the way things were going to be. We would have to ride it out, to deal with it.

Fuck this shit. Daddy doesn’t ‘deal.’

So Thursday we made a same-day appointment for him at the doctors for that afternoon. I was driving him to the dentist that morning (yes, it was an awfully swell day for both of us) and he asked me, “Dad, are you unhappy?” I guess he caught a look at me in the rear-view mirror or something.

I said, “No, son, what I am is determined.”

“Oh,” he said.

I continued by explaining the difference between unhappiness and determination, and explained that what I was determined about was that I was going to make his cough go away. He reminded me that I had told him the same thing on Monday when we went to the doctor and he was still coughing.

I wanted to pull the car over and beat the crap out of the first person who looked at me the wrong way, but decided in addition to setting a poor example for The Boy, that would make us late for the dentist.

Later that afternoon, after a variety of stress-inducing events on the dental, work and home-contractor-repair front, we made it to the doctor’s office with only seconds to spare. We saw a different doctor because his regular sawbones only works every other day, and the fill-in doctor was kind enough to give us a scrip for an inhaler with a drop of steroids in addition to whatever they usually put in those things.

The result? By the next morning, his coughing was down to maybe 10% of what it had been just 24 hours earlier. This morning it’s 7:30 as I write this, and he’s still sleeping peacefully.

I guess all those years of perfecting the art of being a domineering, insensitive, pushy prick (think Ari Gold, without any of the trappings of wealth and power) are finally being put to some good use.

And if your daycare or preschool savants ever eventually reveal to you that there is an illness laying low their entire student body, it takes weeks of slow torture to heal and there’s nothing that can be done about it in the meantime, don’t buy it. Don’t accept the no-win scenario. Even if you have to game the system, a little bit of determination will take you a long way.

Do Be a ‘Don’t-Deal’ Daddy. (Or Mommy, depending on your circumstance.)