I used to do a regular Friday segment where folks could ask me questions and I did various combinations of truth and fiction in the answers. Then everyone and their cousin started doing it and I had been asked what my favorite book was four or five times and so I stopped doing it.
But I kinda dug having a Friday “thing.” So here’s my stab at a new one. This will be the first in a series, unless, of course, I get bored or die or have something else really important happen next Friday that pre-empts the second installment.
Anyway. Friday Flashbacks! See how there’s alliteration? Two Fs in a row just can’t be wrong, people.
Today’s theme is inspired by yesterday’s post. All that reflecting upon the miracle and wonderfulness of my children brought to mind many, many things. And I suppose it was only natural that I would find myself pondering various fond memories of medical emergencies I’ve endured with the kids.
* When Chickadee was a toddler, I was playing with her on the bed one day, and her father came into the room. She sat up on her knees and lunged for him… and missed, falling head-first onto the floor. She was fine but my ex did eventually have to shoot me with a tranquilizer dart to get me to stop screaming. (Shut up. I was a new mother and I thought her neck must’ve snapped.)
* Not too long after that, I opened up Chickadee’s diaper one day and it was full of pee (not unusual) and also copious amounts of blood (!!!!) so I called the pediatrician and they sent us to the ER. Several hours and failed attempts to collect her urine in a little tape-on baggie later, we concluded that she’d eaten some red paint earlier in the day.
* With kids only 20 months apart, I used to put Chickadee in her room to rest/nap and put Monkey in a playpen downstairs for his nap so that they wouldn’t disturb each other. It was common for Monkey to fuss a bit before settling down to sleep. One day he really carried on for quite a while and so finally I went downstairs to check on him. The playpen, the blankets, and the baby himself were all SOAKED in blood. I couldn’t find a scratch on him, and became convinced he’d vomited it up. After a hysterical phone call to the pediatrician, the nice nurse managed to 1) explain to me that he did not have cystic fibrosis, tuberculosis, or stomach cancer, and 2) direct me to check his mouth VERY carefully. While “cruising” his way around the perimeter of the playpen, Monkey had hit his face and severed the frenulum attaching his upper lip to the gums. (It never mended; he has a little flap of skin hanging off his lip attached to nothing.)
* As a toddler Monkey looooooved to pull the pots out of the low cupboards and play with them. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world until the day he managed to wrestle out my stockpot and drop it on his foot. He crumpled to the ground and did the silent scream bit, followed by a shriek that shattered every window within a 5-mile radius. His big toenail was turning black and he fell over every time he tried to walk. We of course rushed him to the Urgent Care center where he passed the time by… running around in circles in the waiting room. (The nail fell off about a month later, but the foot is still attached.)
* This didn’t merit a trip to the doc or the ER, but I’m sure it will be a treasured memory in our family for generations. And I blogged it when it happened, but I’ll mention it again: The day Chickadee mastered riding her bike without training wheels, she ran over Monkey. Ran. OVER. Monkey. BOTH WHEELS. She hit him with the bike, he fell down, ba-bump ba-bump, he had tire tracks. Then everyone cried. We know how to make memories, my family.
Hey! Fridays are fun again! And who KNOWS what I’ll feature next week. Perhaps Squalor I Have Known, or maybe Foods I Have Ruined. The possibilities are endless.
Wanna share the fun? Post your own Friday Flashbacks on the theme of medical emergencies and leave a trackback.
hey: I did credit you when I did the questions thing …
and I finally fixed the link to your blog. er, like 2 days ago.
At my age there are too many perceived medical emergency memories to organize meaningfully. But two that rise to the top (even above the barfing in church episode or curious chest pains)involve a certain girl who shut a car door on her finger immediately before her triumphant cast party on one occasion and wore an ugly imprint of the back of my car’s driver’s seat on her forehead to a birthday party on another.
I’m convinced most people recall their kids emergencies more easily then their own.
I don’t have kid emergencies, but my senior year of highschool at the big homecoming dance, I was breakin’ it down and dislocated my knee.
They had to stop the dance, turn on all the lights, call an ambulance and wheel me out on a stretcher in front of the WHOLE SCHOOL.
Mortifying when you’re 17.
“Squalor I Have Known” made the coffee come out my nose.
the time brady stuck a pea up his nose…..sneezed it out a short while later, then scooped it up and ate it??
barbara: ewwwww!!!
my baby sister was 2, and i was almost 5. she was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, drinking a bottle of juice (back in the old days, when they made those glass gerber bottles that you just screwed a nipple onto and handed to your toddler). i decided i wanted to make toast, and tried to drag the chair she was sitting in across the kitchen floor. dumped baby sister onto the floor, broke the bottle, huge gash across her wrist.
5 stitches later, she was fine, though the cut barely missed the big vein that runs through the wrist. so, i almost killed her, really.
now that she’s 23 and her wrist has grown, the scar has stretched to cover most of the inside of her wrist, with these giant stitch marks. it looks like she tried to slit her wrist, then had a monkey sew it up.
When I had oral surgery a few years ago they had to remove my frenulum because it was in the way. And now, years after my frenulectomy, I still get food caught up in there. My life is forever changed. I hope poor Monkey learns to live with his disability, as I have.
Right before a kindergarten teacher conference my husband decides he is going to teach our daughter how to ride a two wheeler. As she flew over the handlebars he grabbed for the bike and not the child, wth. Several hours in the emergency room and stiches. The weird part is my husband has the same scar on his chin as our daughter, and it is from the same bike. The demon bike was sold.
It was mother’s day, a day I have come to dread as it is always a day spent in the ER for one miscellaneous reason or other. I had to work that Sunday, and was just pulling in the driveway to the sounds of my kids saying YAY! Mommy is home on mother’s day!
As I got out of the car, I hear a CRASH!!! waaaaah!!! and my eldest, who was 8 at the time, had fractured her hand doing a cartwheel of glee that I had finally gotten home. We celebrated Mother’s Day in the ER, and to this day, my daughter apologizes every year! :)
I could do a series on Times I Nearly Killed My Brother. And I suspect I might be a contendah in a Squalor I Have Known-off. Like a bake-off but squalorer.
My boys, then 8 and 4, had a tug-of-war with a red terry-cloth bathrobe belt. I was not aware of this contest, and just heard screaming. I found little one in bed, rolled up in a sleeping bag and refusing to talk. Big one said he didn’t know what happened. So after chewing them out, I get to looking and the sleeping bag is covered in blood. I unwrapped my little burrito and found the back of his head soaked with blood. After washing a few minutes, I found a small gash in his scalp. Big brother got scared and confessed to the tug-of-war. “Mom, he told me to let go, so I did.” Yeah, right. Little brother hit the post of the stair railing and split his head open.
My seven-year-old has no nerve endings. We call him concrete boy because that’s what he thinks he’s made of. So one day we go to the pool, and after we’ve been there about 2.8 seconds, he hits the side of his head on the edge of the pool and rips open his ear. He comes running up to me with blood SPURTING from his ear, wanting to know if I can slap a bandaid on it so he can keep swimming. When I say “oh honey, I think you’re going to need some stitches” he replies “COOL!” Eight stitches later, he’s pissed because the doc says we can’t go BACK TO THE POOL.
Did I mention he was FOUR at the time? *shudders to think of what the teenage years will bring* :)
I won’t share the gross story about my son, his nose and a pair of hedge clippers. I wasn’t a pretty picture.
Prowesslessness, when age 4, put a raisin up his nose. It wouldn’t come out, so we went to the ER where he had two separate screaming sessions: one when they dug the raisin out, and the other when they wouldn’t let him eat it. Not as lucky as Barbara’s Brady.
Well, my girl has taken plenty of hard knocks in her not-quite-three years, but the most memorable (another new-mommy situation): She was about eight months old, and i had her in her high chair eatin’ cheerios while i washed dishes (she was in the kitchen right behind me). I didn’t buckle her in, as i almost never did, because she’d never tried to climb out or anything of that nature in the dozens of times i’d had her in there for the same purpose. Anyway, my back was turned and all of a sudden i heard a thump and an ominous wail. She had somehow wiggled her way out of the damn high chair, as best i can determine and was flat on her back. I scooped her up and put her to the breast to comfort her whereupon she immediately started trying to go to sleep. Now, i didn’t know much but i knew that a child trying to go to sleep right after they’ve taken a sharp knock to the noggin is NOT good. I fuh-reaked out, yo. Called 911 and everything. They got there, were very nice and not condescending to asshat me – by the time they arrived, Sophia was gurgling and wriggling with joy at all the attention, the little traitor. They quickly concluded that all was well tho of course instructed me to monitor her closely. Which proves my theory that she does indeed have an abnormally hard and thick skull, just like myself, bwahahaha.
Oh boy! We’ve had some memorable emergencies here with four kids. My middle son, one day slipped getting out of the shower, and actually cut his penis on the shower door track! There was blood and a gash. We ran off to the Dr.’s, where it was found not to be too bad, but the poor embarassed nurse had to apply a gauze dressing, which she wrapped around and around his penis.
Another episode was when my two youngest boys both made a mad dash for the turkey wishbone I had drying up on the windowsill over the kitchen sink. The youngest ended up getting poked in the eye with the turkeybone, and there was blood, and another mad dash to the Dr.’s.
Another time, the two youngest were out playing in the snow, when the youngest fell and gashed his chin open. As we were headed for the Dr’s, the middle son assured me that he had shoveled the bloody snow over the hill, so we wouldn’t have to look at it!
And, I guess I will tell you one more, (notice the trend here, it is all about BOYS), my oldest son was getting ready to go to his soccer game.We were sitting in the kitchen, trying to eat a quick meal before we left. He didn’t want to eat, then he had a belly ache, which quickly traveled downward, and a short time later, he’s holding his scrotum and screaming!! A quick call to the Dr. told us to race for the emergency room, and they would have a surgeon waiting!!!!
The poor kid could not even walk. Turns out he had a torsion of a little knob of flesh on one of his testicles!! He had emergency surgery on both of his testicles!!
Countless others, including one that ended up in a medical journal!!
Mine was so long, I just wrote a post about it. Read at your own risk.
I *still* don’t know how to do trackbacks, so here’s my link:
http://elswhere.blogspot.com/2005/05/safety-rail-hah.html
Hey! My daughter did the same thing with her “frenulum” (never knew that was the name of it) when she was about 8 months old. The two bottom teeth she had at the time split that little muscle and now it looks like “flappage.” SO, I guess there’s not long term speech problems from this? My dentist didn’t think it was a big deal when I mentioned it to him.
My son did something similar (but more damage to his gums than his frenulum. He fell and his chin hit a very low window sill and his mouth bled and bled. He was my first-born and my husband had gone out to get a movie. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he walked in the door to find me, covered in blood and both me and my son hysterically crying. Ahh…isn’t parenthood a barrell of fun at times?
Gee – all this danger and blood. I can remember how snug and unscathed MY daughter was… sleeping peacefully in her closed clothes closet. Safe and sound, wrapped to invisibility in her blanket, fast asnooze.. Never mind that her poor, crazed mother couldn’t find her and didn’t think the child-snatchers were in town, but ya never know for sure about those things.
And so it was that Mir spent that morning, embarking on her newfound career of tormenting her mom. What a knack she had. Those were the days.
I love you, hon.
My daughter ate a glow stick– you know, those green glowy things you give out at halloween. I walked into her room as she screamed and all I could see in the darkness was a huge green glowing, mouth. I called 911. It made me feel slightly better that the paramedics didn’t know glow sticks were completely non-toxic either.