The Skeezling had her first trip to the emergency room today.
See, what happened was, she was goofing around in my MIL’s kitchen, as two-year-olds are wont to do. In the process of having grand fun, and not doing anything particularly out of the ordinary, she managed to fall.
Facefirst, into the corner of the kitchen cabinet.
Now, in a fair number of families there’s one parent who handles injury-type crisis fairly well, and one who doesn’t. Sure, nobody’s happy when the tyke first bonks herself on the noggin with the underside of the dining room table, or that first time your little one falls flat on his face whilst still learnin’ to walk, and knocks the wind out of himself for a minute, but these aren’t all that bad, once you get over the initial shock. A lot of parents, I’ve observed, have that moment of pure adrenaline fear, and then they’re so busy telling the child that, “it’s allright, you’re fine, no big deal,” and trying to distract the kid from what is, in fact, no big deal, that they don’t have time to really get upset.
When you spend six hours in the ER, OTOH, you’ve got time to get awful damned frazzled.
Now me, I’m generally not the calm one, in our house. Her first bad ear infection, when she had a temp of about 102, I was a wreck. Checked on her every hour, all night long, got no sleep, climbed the walls between checks, telling myself to let the kid sleep, telling myself to get some sleep so’s I wasn’t useless all the next day. All of it pointless, of course. She was fine in a day or two. I get more butterflies in my stomach than she does, when we go for a round of vaccination shots. Y’all with little ones know the drill.
Now I grant you, I present a fairly calm exterior, for her sake, since it’s pretty obvious that if Daddy’s nervous and shaky, she’s only gonna get more upset herself, during these bad patches. So I get through whatever it is, and once she’s safely asleep, or engaged in something with her mother or one of her grandparents, I’ll go into the other room and quietly have a quick nervous breakdown, only to come out all smiles, and asking, “Who wants ice cream?”
But today, I was the cool customer. Now, head wounds bleed profusely, no matter how serious they are. A head wound long and deep enough to require six stitches bleeds a shitload, gang. But I was cool. We got the bleeding stopped with a cold compress, we got to the ER, we sat and filled out endless rounds of pointless paperwork (her employer? her sexual history? her last period? her drinking history? She’s TWO fahcryinoutloud!) and we eventually got to the really bad bit.
See, you can’t talk a two-year-old into sitting still for stitches, especially from the top of her nose all the way up to her hairline. So they need to sedate her. Conscious sedation, they call it.
Parent’s worst fucking nightmare, I call it. But I’m cool.
See, there’s this stuff called (I think) Ketamine. It doesn’t knock you quite unconscious, but it does render you pretty well stoned, and unresponsive. The idea is, as I was told, you really won’t remember what happens to you whilst under the influence o’ this stuff, and you won’t put up much of a fight. So they give the kid a whack of this stuff, and about two minutes later, there she goes.
Mrs. Skeezix is holding her in her lap, and we’re talking about all the wonderful things we’re gonna do later today, and all the fun we’re gonna have tonight, as my child slips into la-la land, looking to my eyes like nothing so much as a dog we had put to sleep, many many years ago. Her eyes are open and glazed, staring at nothing in particular, she’s going limp…
This being a parent shit ain’t for the squeamish. But I’m cool.
I bludgeon that thought into the back of my head with a mental crowbar, and take her tiny little hand in mine, as Mrs. Skeezix heads for the high ground. She couldn’t take any more. So I’m sitting beside her bed, and they drape a sterile cloth over her face, with a hole positioned over the gash in her forehead, and I go solo on the “and we’ll have chicken for dinner, and go down to the beach and watch the fireworks” routine, since she’s still argueably conscious. And she lets out this little noise. It’s weak, and panicky, and I go right on with the line of patter, squeezing her hand a bit tighter, as the doc is administering the local anasthetic, and then stitching my angelic, beautiful, precious daughter’s previously unmarked little brow back together, with Six. Ugly. Black. Stitches.
And I’m cool. Just about everybody gets childhood ER stitches at some point. She’s not concussed. She didn’t gash her eye. She’s not staying overnight in a cold unfamiliar hospital bed. This is in no way life-threatening…
I’m cool. Not just putting up a front, but I’m handling this well. In the grand scheme of her life, this is a minor bump. And I believe it when I tell this to myself.
Now, she’s had no lunch, as this happened right as Mrs. Skeezix was preparing to bring her home for lunch from my MIL’s, missed out on nap time, and had an overall lousy day. So as she slowly comes up from the sedation, she wakes up just enough to convince us that she’s feeling fine, and conks out. Sound asleep.
The doc, of course, wants to see her up and about before she can be discharged, what with the blow to the head, and all. So we get to spend another two hours hanging out in a dinky little room, while the Skeezling sleeps alternately on my and the Mrs’ shoulders, refusing to sleep in the hospital bed, but unable to stay awake for more than a moment or two.
I’m cool.
We eventually get home, go and show off the “bad boo-boo” to the grandparents, reassure all and sundry that she’s fine, and go on with our evening.
We did, in fact, have chicken and cole-slaw for dinner, we did, in fact, go down to the beach to watch the fireworks, we did, in fact, have a good ole’ time. With her bangs covering her forehead, you’d never suspect that the kid had a thing wrong with her. She was fine, and enjoyed herself.
She fell asleep on the way home, in her carseat. I got her out of it, at home, took her in and pausing only long enough to remove her sandy beach shoes, put her to bed.
Now, would someone please pass the valium and prozac cocktails? I’m “Joanie Loves Chachi” over here. No cool to be seen.
Blood, my own or someone else’s, doesn’t bother me. But next time I’m passin’ out at the sight, and lettin’ someone else be the cool one.
[sub]Yeah, I’m also lying through my teeth. But it would be less stressful. What a friggin’ day.[/sub]