Not for the faint of heart

So, I got to spend five fun-filled hours the other night in the local emergency room with my eleven year-old son. This might be alarming to some of you, but as the mother of five children – this particular child being #4 in the lineup – it was not my first rodeo.

Turns out Prince Fourthborn was chasing his stepbrother across the kitchen. He slipped on a puddle of water at the base of our refrigerator (melted ice from the door dispenser), which resulted in a crash and burn that landed him on the floor and drove his foot up under the bottom of the refrigerator. Evidently, the bottoms of refrigerators are razor sharp, because when he jerked his foot out it resulted in a nasty cut straight across his ankle bone. And of course, I wasn’t home when the injury occurred. I was at the grocery store.

It was about 6 pm and I was carrying in groceries from the car when one of the kids ran up and told me I should see the cut on Joseph’s foot. No big deal, I thought to myself. Nothing a little Neosporin won’t fix.

He limped into the kitchen and I glanced down at what looked like a Band-Aid across his ankle; then I noticed the Band-Aid was blood soaked. Okay. I reached down and pulled it off, which was really easy to do because it was so wet. What lay under there was not pretty. In fact, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking at because it was definitely not just cut or scraped skin. There was… tissue of some kind sticking out. It was really gross. But I’m the mom, right? Nothing is supposed to faze me.

My brother-in-law, the EMT, was sitting on the couch in the living room, so in my best nonchalant voice I said, “Uh, Paul. You may wanna come look at this.”

He kept watching TV, so I tried again. “Paul. You wanna come look at this?”

“Bring him over here; I didn’t even know he was hurt.”

“Paul, get over here and look at this!!!” So much for my calm mommy voice.

He came over, looked at it and said, “Yeah, that’s gonna need some stitches. Pretty bad laceration. Got any thread?”

And that’s when my son and I left for the emergency room.

Now, there are two hospitals in our little town. One is newer than the other, so I tried that one first. I know how long emergency room visits can take and I was hoping the newer one would be less crowded. I was wrong. We pulled around back where the ER was and it was packed with cars. There weren’t many people around, so I pulled under the portico, left my wounded kid in the car, and ran in to check. I was met at the door by the smell of urine so strong it reminded me of the time I had to crawl to the top of a 3-story McDonald’s playground to rescue Katie when she was a toddler. To my right was a door that led into the waiting room where a lady lay across three chairs against the wall; a doctor and a nurse with a blood pressure machine was standing in front of her asking how many times she had thrown up that day. When she replied, “Seven,” I turned around and walked right back out the swinging double doors.

We headed to the other ER.

So it took an hour to get into Triage, then another hour before the doctor came into the room. He said the cut was nasty and needed stitches – surprise – then he left. My long suffering son was starting to get a little worried, which is understandable, so I reassured him that they would deaden the area before they sewed him up. Then he asked me how they would deaden the area. “With a shot,” I told him.

“They’re going to give me a shot in my cut?!?”

“No, it’ll be around the cut, not directly in it.” You’d think I would know better by now than to assume things I really know nothing about. You’d think.

Another hour later the nurse brought in the suture tray, then another hour after that the doctor came back in to do his thing. (Did I mention neither of us had eaten since lunch? I managed to scrounge a few M&M’s and some sugar-free gum out of my purse to keep us from total starvation. M&M’s never tasted so good.) He washed off the cut and then pulled out the biggest syringe I’ve ever seen in my life – and I’ve seen a few – and proceeded to stick that thing right inside the cut. He squeezed off a few shots here, there and everywhere, poking the syringe around that cut like a bird trying to catch a worm on speed.

Joseph was a lot braver than most grownups would have been. He teared up a little, tried to relax, grabbed the bed rail and said ouch a lot, but he made it through. And that’s when I got the look.

It was the same look I’d gotten from his oldest brother many years before, on a similar trip to the ER. Zach’s finger had been slammed in a window by Prince Secondborn. Blood had pooled, painful and purple-black, under the fingernail; it was obvious the pressure was going to have to be released somehow. I assured him that the doctor would have some kind of machine that would perform the procedure quickly and relatively painlessly, and not to worry, his finger wasn’t broken. Minutes later the doctor swept into the room, told us the finger was broken, whipped out a paper clip, unfolded it, heated the tip of it with a Bic lighter and jabbed it into the nail. My son squealed, blood squirted across the room, and I got the look. The look that said, “I trusted you. I won’t make that mistake again.”

Alas, all kids eventually figure out their parents don’t know everything.

Moms are people, too

I love my mom. When I was a little girl, I thought the stars and moon were hung by her. She was pretty and warm and smelled wonderful. She baked treats and gave big hugs and made the best butter and sugar sandwiches in the world.

Then I grew up.

One of the roughest transitions a person has to make on the road to adulthood is adjusting to the fact that our parents are normal human beings. They are, after all, mere mortals complete with faults, frailties and annoying habits. Some of us face this sad truth while we’re still young and living at home, some of us after we move out and begin families of our own, and some of us never do. But we’ll leave ex-boyfriends out of this for now.

My dear mom, bless her heart, is a strong, passionate woman. She loves with her whole heart and soul. Part of that big love includes the need to control and micromanage the objects of her affection. She sincerely believes she knows what’s best for everyone, her way is the best (and only) way, and the single biggest problem with the world today is that they don’t let her run it.

Years of self analysis, the study of Zen, yoga, prayer and prescription drugs have helped me to accept my mom as she is. But she’s not the best houseguest in the world. And it’s not completely her fault.

There is something that comes over me when she comes for a visit and it isn’t pretty. Years of conditioning, normally dormant, are awakened at the knowledge of her impending arrival. I storm through the house like a maniac, cleaning everything to within an inch of its life. Baseboards, window ledges, the top of the refrigerator, no space is safe. I bark orders, frown, yell and criticize. Fortunately, (or unfortunately, I’m not sure which) my kids are used to the drill and have learned to lay low until the storm passes. It’s so bad that even on normal days if I’m cleaning out the refrigerator or something, they ask if Nanny is coming over.

This past week, my mom told me she was coming for a visit and would call when she left her house. No problem. I figured it takes more than an hour for her to get to my house, even under the best of circumstances, so from the time she called I could put finishing touches on the house and maybe even get to the grocery store and back before she got here. Wrong. Instead, my cousin called and said they were already in Dayton. Thirty minutes away. 

I started to plow through the house like Martha Stewart on crack. Dust was flying, mops were slinging and the dogs were hiding under the bed. As I slammed through the guest bathroom and yelled at no one in particular for not helping fast enough, my eternally calm, cool and collected teenage daughter, hand on hip, cocked her eyebrow and said, “Gosh, Mom. I don’t know why you’re freaking out. It’s just family.”

Silly girl.

She watched and smirked while I swept the baseboard and dusted the bottom legs of our antique china cabinet, rolling her eyes at my furious attention to detail. Remorse hit me. What kind of example was I being?

“I don’t ever want you to think you have to do this when I’m coming over,” I told her between broom strokes. “I mean, I want you to have a clean house. But only because it’s more comfortable and the right thing to do, not because of me.”

“I know, Mom. Don’t worry,” she replied. “I won’t.”

Somehow that didn’t make me feel better.

Finally as much was done as could be done. There wasn’t a single piece of lint on the clothes dryer, the floors were wall-to-wall spotless, the bathrooms were clean and fresh. The dogs even ventured back out from under the bed.

And my mom arrived.

I walked her and my cousin through the house to show them around. My cousin had never been to our house before, and we’d made some changes since the last time my mom had been up. We made it to my daughter’s room last and small talk was made before my mom asked her, “Do you watch TV in here, Katie?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said.

“Well I don’t know how you can, there’s so much dust on that screen.”

Just family, indeed.

Getting started

I wrote a column for a friend of mine who was the editor of The Montgomery County News. The column was very popular and I enjoyed writing it, so when she left MCN, I decided to create a new place to display previous and new entries. This is that new place!