In the last month I’ve had not one, but two rounds of a toddler disease known colloquially as “Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease”. Not to be confused with “Hoof-and-Mouth”, a fatal bovine illness to which I am immune due to not technically being a cow or horse at this time. The symptoms are as follows:

• Initial stage (lasts one to two days) fever and splitting headache.
• Stinging, itching sores on your hands.
• Stinging, itching sores on your feet.
• A large assortment of exquisitely painful sores inside your mouth and throat.

    The first time around I found my various boo-boos interesting from a purely intellectual standpoint: I’ve never had an illness cause sores on any part of my body before. I worried at the little bumps on my hands constantly, counting and re-counting their number on a periodic basis.

    Within a few days, however, the fascination gave way to annoyance as the skin on my hands and feet began peeling off as if I’d been sun-burned. Perhaps I was molting; I thought to myself as my epidermis slaughed off like an Ikea-manufactured surgical glove. To be on the safe side I measured my hands to establish a bench-mark in case they were going to become slightly larger after the molting process completed.

    I was disappointed to find that while my hands were pink, soft and fresh, they never hardened and were, as far as I could tell from the readings I’d taken with my my crude plastic Smurf ruler and fabric tape-measure, the exact same size as they were before my ordeal.

    A couple of weeks went by, marked by nothing much, and I seemed to have made a full recovery. Then, last Thursday I noticed that I was starting to get the chills and began to get that same headache again. Something seemed amiss. So I was not exactly surprised when I received a call from Riley’s day care telling me that we should not bring her in to school on Friday as it appears that she has contracted Hand, Foot and Mouth again.

    The headache wasn’t as intense this time, and I never got any sores on my hands. Fortunately I’d taken Friday off of work on account of Samantha having a piano recital in the evening and arrangements had to be made.

    A piano recital is a sort of mass exhibition of rudimentary skill followed by cakes and coffees. Friday was the assigned day. for it, and the cakes and coffees were unlikely to spontaneously manifest. So Riley spent the day with me, at least two hours of which were taken up by a trip to the family doctor for the two of us while far less time was spent obtaining cakes and coffees.

    Doc Fortune said there was nothing to worry about, its only contagious during the first stage (fever and headaches, in case you weren’t paying attention) and that we should drink plenty of fluids and take it easy. Oh, and please pay the $50 office-visit co-pay on your way out, thank-you-very-much.

    Home I went, a bit poorer for the experience and lighter in the wallet area. And while I d been spared the sores on the hands this time around, I was plagued with a massive number of sores in my mouth.

    I tried counting them but gave up around twenty. A veritable constellation of tiny, white, prickly little pin-points with two or three super-novas of exquisite agony thrown in for good measure, my mouth was such a disaster area that I sucked down an entire package of anesthetic lozenges and started administering shots of Chloroseptic three times an hour.

    I survived on a diet of warm coffee mixed with instant-breakfast for the weekend, with the only solid food I was able to consume being a bowl of tofu-laced rice and vegetables at a mediocre sushi shop in Toronto, Canada.

    Did I mention I went to Toronto on Saturday?