As a baby - Fell out of my cot. Mum rushed me to the ER to have me checked out. While I was there they discovered I had meningitis.
9 - Acidently poured boiling hot water onto my hand. Another trip to the ER.
That’s about it. There was a hospital stay in between those two, but no ER visits.
Bit by a neighbor’s dog when I was 6. The next day the Humane Society showed up and wanted to take the dog to be tested for rabies. The neighbor shot the dog instead.
My trips to the ER:
6 months: 106 or 107 degree fever. Seizures, respiratory failure. No cause known.
1 year or so: was sitting on a homemade Sit N’ Spin (made out of wood and an old carburetor). My brother and I flew off in different directions. I had the wind knocked out of me and my brother had four stitches in his eyelid from hitting a table.
3 years: ran face first full tilt into a screen door. Sprained my neck and was in a brace for a month.
4 years: car accident. I was the only one hurt when our Buick rolled three times down an embankment. Concussion and resulting seizures.
4 years: broken arm at daycare. Went to kick a soccer ball and hit the top, flipped over and landed on my arm. I complained about the pain and the workers told me to sit down and shut up, and didn’t call my father to come pick me up. When he showed up at six, daycare center workers swore I was sitting quietly in a chair when my arm started to hurt. Never went back to that daycare center again.
9 years: 106 degree fever due to tonsillitis. We were in North Dakota on Thanksgiving Day. Mom gave me aspirin and told me they were children’s aspirin. I chewed them up and promptly vomited copiously all over the waiting room. Seems they were regular adult aspirin. Thanks, Mom. I was unhappy, to say the least.
Older than 10:
Eight trips during four years of college for strep throat infections and one sprained ankle due to drunken wrestling. Fun!
Trips not involving me, except as driver or 911 caller:
An artist friend of mine got a chunk torn from her cornea by a friend in a pillow fight. She refused to go because she hates doctors, so I put her in the car and made her go. She had a cool pirate patch for two weeks.
Suicide attempt number one: dorm neighbor knocks on my door at 3 am, dressed only in her underwear and a tshirt, holding an empty bottle of ibuprofen and saying “what have I done?”.
Suicide attempt number two: friend who recently had a chunk of her temporal lobe removed because of seizures and blackouts caused by a herniation through the skull (oh so astutely diagnosed by student health as “depression” and put her on birth control) took a bottle of dilantin and called me because she wanted to end it all (her girlfriend had broken up with her after the surgery).
I went to the ER once when I was maybe 6 or 7 because I was hit in the back of the head with a metal swing. I was sort of playing a solo version of Harborman’s aggressive “Jay walking” game. That one required two or three stitches.
And a couple summers later I fell off my bike on a gravel driveway and had to have stitches in my knee. It still has two scars: a big wrinkley “rainbow” shaped one where I got the stitches, and a big round one where a chunk was torn out but couldn’t be stitched up.
I was also hospitalized when I was about 7 for what they called at the time “raw milk disease.” I’m guessing it was a campylobacter infection. It wasn’t the infection that hospitalized me exactly, but the dehydration from the diarreah. I don’t remember now if a trip to the ER preceded the hospitalization, or just a trip to the pediatrician.
I also had pneumonia when I was about 7, but again I don’t remember if I went to the ER ever or just the pediatrician. I know they were worried I’d have to be hospitalized if they couldn’t get my fever down, but the doctor gave my mom some nasty medicine in little brown bottles, and she had to wake me up just about every hour on the hour and pour it down my throat, and thankfully it worked.
Anyway, thanks for this trip down memory lane 
Never before I was 10 or 11 (although once when I was six and fell off the monkey bars onto the paved playground I should have gone – you could still see the scar if I didn’t have a beard).
When I was 10, we were jumping shipping pallets on our bikes at Warren’s house. We’d stacked them up, but no one was brave enough to try and jump the two laid end to end before I gave it a shot. I cleared them by a mile, BTW, but then didn’t have enough stopping distance between there and the ditch where Warren’s street ended. :smack: I abraded off all the skin on my inner left arm from wrist to above the elbow, got a couple minor cuts elsewhere and cracked a molar (which proceeded to shed little slivers of enamel for the next several days).
When I was 12 I had an asthma attack which developed bronchitis. This was less than a year after the aforementioned Warren died from asthma, so as you can imagine everyone was pretty edgy.
Also when I was 12 I was trying to ride my 10-speed no hands standing up (a trick I later mastered, BTW), fell off and broke my hand.
–Cliffy
Oh yes, those masonry towels that were so popular several years back.
–Cliffy
This whole thread is pretty disturbing, but I have to say:
OW! OW! OW! Holy CRAP, OW!
OK, this requires real thinking…
I had never realized just how many times I had been to the ER until I started thinking about it.
Thats it for me and the ER. Strep, ear infections and that kind of stuff was taken care of by our doctor.
I remember my sister doing a blackflip off of a double seated swing set (unintentional) and spent 2 days in the hospital. Same sister fell asleep standing up and cracked her head on a bookshelf. Lots of blood.
my brother cracked his chin open 2 different times.
My kids on the other hand, seem to live there. too much to count. but let me say that my goal in life before my move to Denver was to not be known by name and face in the local ER. I was known in the Army Hospital in Fairbanks, Boston Children’s, An Airforce ER in California, and 2 different ER’s in Las vegas
Ther is nothing in the world like walking into an ER and having the nurse say “oh! Hello Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s Mom, come on in, I’ll get you a bed and then get your records…”
I guess you have a guardian devil.
I never went to the ER at all as a child. I’ve only been once as an adult–for severe dehydration after a week-long bout with some kind of intestinal bug.
My brother went twice, that I recall–once when he fell and bit through his tongue, trying to reach the cookie jar, and once for appendicitis.
My kids have never been to the ER proper, but we did take each of them to after-hours urgent care once. My daughter for a cut on her forehead and my son when he develop a hydrocele at 15 months (not dangerous, but pretty alarming if you don’t know what it is.)
I never went to the ER for myself when I was little. I probably should have, but my dad is one of the cheapest men you’ll ever meet, and since he is certified in first aid, he thinks he’s a doctor. First time, I was swimming. MY brothers and sister and I thought it was really fun to shove the kickboards below the water and then let go so they would fly up out of the water and into the air. One time I didn’t aim right, it hit me in the chin, and I bit a hole through my tongue. After sucking on a towel for about an hour, I looked in the mirror and squished my tongue with my fingers. Kind of shocking to see all the way through to the bottom of my mouth through the hole in my tongue!! But dad said I was fine. :rolleyes: The second time, I sat down on a couch and threw my head back. There was a window sill behind me made of stone and I split my scalp open. BLood everywhere, me screaming and crying, so Dad takes a pair of scissors, cuts my hair down really short, and taped it together. I guess it worked out okay though, and to be honest, I was glad to escape getting stitches. I’ve taken my daughter to the ER a few times. When she was one, my husband’s (now ex) best friend backed into her and kicked her in the eye. I feared a broken cheek bone, so we took her to the ER. Turns out she was fine, but I’ve never let the guy live that one down. Second time, her hands and feet were blue and she had a cold. I thought she wasn’t getting enough oxygen, but it turns out that she just turns blue when she’s even slightly cold. For the first time about a month ago, I took my 21 month old son to the ER. Ex was “watching” our kids at a party, (he said he was standing next to him, I was later told by party goers that he was across the room sitting on his ass, watching TV :mad: ) when my poor little baby got on a ride on toy and took off, flipping down 8 hardwood stairs, banged his head really hard and promptly fell asleep. We took him to the ER because I thought he had a concussion, but luckily, he was fine.