The fevers were a hallmark of our son’s sixth year. Each attack announced itself with a headache, sore throat, and vomiting. His temperature shot up, often hovering around 101℉ for three to four days, with three weeks in between the bouts if you counted from the first day of symptoms. We had no idea why these fevers were happening. They came on like clockwork, were not related to a virus, and were not contagious. Ibuprofen, when he could keep it down, helped bank his internal fires, but it didn’t change the frequency or length of his mysterious life-interrupting slow burns.
Between October 2011 and June 2012, the boy was “sick” in this way for over 40 days. I had no job outside of the house, and grad school was barely a twinkle in my weary eye. My time was the boy’s time, and time was our prison. We had a drill. Come headache, come stomach pains, come the conflagration, and the boy and I would retreat to our guest bedroom (aka the back room). I would set him up with ice water, a just-in-case bowl, movies, and endless runs of Curious George. We sat next to each other in bed, the boy’s cheeks flushed scarlet, patchy with heat. He watched TV, sometimes read. I scoured the internet looking for answers.
I became a medical sleuth. My father provided me with a (sobering) family medical history, heavy on depression and autoimmune diseases. Based on bloodwork (the result of a terrible trip for a blood draw, the boy mid-attack, that ended in him vomiting in the car), the boy’s fevers did appear to be inflammatory in nature, his immune system gone awry. Was a paternal great-aunt’s hospitalization as a child in the ‘30s, two years of adolescence lost to “Saint Vitus Dance” one clue to the boy’s struggles? Or did my grandmother’s years of mysterious, debilitating illness, eventually attributed to Addison’s disease and lupus, contribute? The family history of diabetes (grandfather, father, aunt) or thyroid issues (father, me) may also have been precursors to the boy’s fever attacks.
My mother’s family health history remained remained a mystery. Adopted as an infant, later denied contact by her birth mother, her biological father a mystery man, her background was a blank slate. Finding out more about her history, our history, became the second part of my focus that year. I had her mother’s likely name and hometown, ancestry.com DNA leads, and practically unlimited time. As Jack Sparrow sparred his way out of sticky situations for the umpteenth time and Mr. Fox outsmarted Boggis, Bunce, and Bean yet again, I mined the vast information stores of the internet to identify our genetic antecedents.
It doesn’t take much to track someone down. There are sites out there that do the dirty work for you for a low price. If, like me, you have an obsessive, curious, and determined mind, as well as the time to indulge it, these sites are superfluous. When caught up in a search, I leave no link unclicked. In previous, non-family focused deep dives I uncovered an arrest record for a former middle school crush, gawped at an awkward high school yearbook photo of myself at barely fourteen, and cringed at the fundamentalist ravings of a former classmate. In this case, I was helped by census records from the 1940s, which taught me more about my grandmother’s family and, along with DNA-informed hunches, helped narrow down the potential name of my grandfather. News stories and other records revealed that my grandmother, who was seventeen when she had my mother, married less than two years later and had another daughter a couple of years after that. I also located a marriage announcement for that daughter, my half-aunt, and discovered she had become a psychotherapist.
On a typical feverish March Tuesday, the back room pulsating with the usual feelings of boredom, anxiety, and frustration, I was paging through hundreds of hits on my grandmother’s family name and hometown, another search in the dark. This time I uncovered something surprising. It was news story from (oddly) a Canadian paper. The article described a late July afternoon in Delaware, a girl’s older brother, fifteen at the time, hearing her screams from a cornfield. The brother runs into the house, grabs a shotgun, runs back out again, and unloads the gun in the direction of his sister’s fleeing assailant. I imagined that green expanse of corn rippling in the humid breeze, the moment of realization on his part, the endurance and fight on hers. The girl’s attacker, an Army private, was later discovered with a shoulder wound at the local base. The girl, who was named in the article (as was her brother), required treatment at a local hospital. She was eleven.
My pulse quickened. The room, stuffy with the remains of picked-over nachos, heavy on the jalapeño and congealed cheese, suddenly seemed even more oppressive. Curious George snickered from the television. Glancing over to see if I was paying attention (I was not), the boy emanated heat. The kids’ names checked out. They were the right ages. This was my grandmother and great-uncle.
My initial response was one of disbelief, that I had found the article, that she had experienced such a traumatic event. The second was a complex, strange brew of feelings, two parts guilt to one part thrill. Trauma isolates. It separates you from others. You feel unseen and unwitnessed because you were unseen and unwitnessed. The places where I expected overlap between me, my mother, and her mother became more complicated. Trauma in its various permutations was a new connection. I felt less alone. I felt horribly sad. I also had more questions. Did her family help her make sense of the traumatic event, did they rally around her, or was she buried in shame? Did the attack make her vulnerable to other traumas, perhaps leading to the sex (consensual? nonconsensual?) that resulted in my mother’s conception?
My grandmother’s sexual assault (as I eventually learned it was) likely had nothing to do with the boy’s fevers. It would be a stretch to connect it to his overactive immune system. It wasn’t a fact that was necessary to find to find her. But it was a stark detail, a bit of traumatic personal history that I later learned she had kept secret (from her husband, from her daughter), much like she suppressed the fact of my mother’s existence. It deepened my curiosity about the ways trauma gets passed along, not only through experience and exposure, but through our DNA. What potential epigenetic traces does trauma leave across generations? The answer for the moment is unclear. In addition, research around the ways trauma is expressed genetically currently focuses mainly on complex traumas or those experienced by large swaths of the population. But the question continues to intrigue me.
The time of fevers ended the summer between first and second grade. It is unclear why they stopped. It may have been the “bad medicine” (aka cimetidine, which the boy originally took in its bitter liquid form) he was prescribed on a hunch that he had periodic fever, aphthous stomatitis, pharyngitis, adenitis syndrome or PFAPA . He may have simply grown out of it. Over a decade later, I can look back on those lost weeks with a certain nostalgia—all that time with the small and cuddly version of the boy, the lack of responsibility for almost anything else, the world outside the back room flattened and unreal, a memory of a hallucination, a fever dream. In the process, I uncovered a personal history and piqued my curiosity about the unspoken connections between my grandmother, mother, and me. We were young once, and vulnerable. We were unprotected, unseen, stumbling along into the future, ignoring the pain within. But maybe we weren’t as alone as we felt. Maybe a witness after the fact is better than no witness at all.
