But three days later the nausea began.
The Small Symptoms That Wouldn’t Leave
One morning I walked past Mason’s bedroom and noticed that the door was half open, which struck me as unusual because he normally burst out of the room the moment he woke up, already talking about breakfast before his feet even touched the floor.
Instead, he sat on the edge of his bed with his shoulders slightly hunched forward, his hands pressed against his stomach and his face pale in a way that made my chest tighten with concern.
When he looked up at me, his eyes seemed unusually glassy.
“I don’t feel great, Mom,” he murmured quietly.
At first I assumed it was a common stomach virus, the kind that spreads quickly through elementary schools during the colder months when children share desks, pencils, and water fountains.
Kids brought home illnesses from school all the time, and most of them passed within a day or two.
But as the days continued, that explanation began to feel less convincing.
During the second week something far more unsettling appeared.
Mason stopped running through the house.
He stopped asking where his ball was.
The cardboard castles he loved building remained stacked in the corner of the garage, untouched.
Instead of racing down the hallway or talking endlessly about the next imaginary adventure he planned to create, he spent long stretches of time sitting quietly near the living-room window, staring out at the street as if he were too tired to even explain what he was feeling.
The silence that settled into our home felt unfamiliar and heavy, and although I tried to convince myself that he simply needed a few days to recover from whatever virus had found its way into his system, a quiet worry began to grow inside me.
It was the kind of worry that parents recognize immediately but rarely want to name out loud.
