Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
Last night I was in the kitchen, minding my own business and making dinner as I generally do between the hours of 5 and 6 PM. My beloved was working, as he has generally been doing between the hours of 6 AM and 6 PM for the last four weeks or so. As such, I was doing what I often do when I truly need to get something done--I was leaving the kids to their own devices in the living room.
They had been having tremendous fun in the fort/igloo I'd made for them out of a large roll of remnant carpeting that's waiting to be cut to fit our 55-degree, tile-floored master bath. I had peeked in on them a few times, and on one of those occasions, our littlest had handed me a penny which I remembered having left atop some laundry headed upstairs. Thinking that I was being fun, I smiled and put it in the kitty pocket on the front of her sweater.
It was just a few minutes later that I heard gagging from the direction of the igloo. Having just renewed my CPR/Heimlich certification, my rescue circuits went into overdrive as I dashed into the living room. The little girl with the kitty pockets was lying on her back on the collapsed fort, her eyes the size of small saucers. (They're the size of small saucers under normal circumstances, so I wasn't sure whether to be alarmed by this or not.)
My mind went immediately to the coin. "Did you put that penny in your mouth?" I asked her.
"Yes," she said plainly.
"And did you spit it out?" I asked, hopeful.
"No," she answered.
"Where is it now?" I asked, less hopeful.
"In my throat," she said. At least it was helpful that she had a vocabulary that enabled her to respond so clearly.
This was the point at which I entered crazed ambivalence. 'Kids swallow coins all the time, right?' I asked myself.
'Oh, most definitely,' part of me said. The other part of me was already flagellating my own back with a horsewhip. What kind of mother would put a penny in her two-year-old's pocket?!
While the money-gulper went about her business, I went about mine--the business of calling those professionals in my life who know what to do in these situations. I started with my sister, who happens to be a pediatric triage nurse and answers questions from lax parents like me--and, I hope, much laxer ones--all day long.
She basically told me that this, too, shall pass (and you know the sense in which I mean that), and that I should watch for respiratory difficulty, vomiting, or fever. That was mildly reassuring, but any advice that contains the words "respiratory distress" is, well, distressing.
Next on the list were my in-laws. She is a retired teacher; he is a pediatrician. Surely one of them had dealt with this at some point? But alas, the doctor was not in the house, and my mother-in-law had been responsible enough a parent not to have faced the coin-in-the-throat scenario. She suggested feeding her a piece of bread to push it through in case it was still stuck in her esophagus.
Finally, I made the call with which I should have started, to NurseDirect, the 24-hour on-call service of our local HMO. These, of course, were the people we'd sue if anything happened to our little girl as a result of inaction, so they recommended, based on the fact that she was pointing down her throat and saying her mouth hurt, that we have her seen immediately.
So off my husband went (she chose him over me, probably because I was the one who indirectly got her in this mess) on his second trip to Immediate Care in less than a month. And he returned just over an hour later with a little girl festooned with stickers and a large chest X-ray which had indeed revealed a penny waiting patiently at the mouth of the stomach.
We fed her some peanut butter bread when she complained that it still hurt, and for a second--we hope it was the second in which the foreign object entered her stomach--she seemed in a world of pain. But then all was well, and she was as chipper as could be.
So for the next couple of days, I'll be on "poop patrol." I suppose it's my due and will reinforce an important lesson learned.
They had been having tremendous fun in the fort/igloo I'd made for them out of a large roll of remnant carpeting that's waiting to be cut to fit our 55-degree, tile-floored master bath. I had peeked in on them a few times, and on one of those occasions, our littlest had handed me a penny which I remembered having left atop some laundry headed upstairs. Thinking that I was being fun, I smiled and put it in the kitty pocket on the front of her sweater.
It was just a few minutes later that I heard gagging from the direction of the igloo. Having just renewed my CPR/Heimlich certification, my rescue circuits went into overdrive as I dashed into the living room. The little girl with the kitty pockets was lying on her back on the collapsed fort, her eyes the size of small saucers. (They're the size of small saucers under normal circumstances, so I wasn't sure whether to be alarmed by this or not.)
My mind went immediately to the coin. "Did you put that penny in your mouth?" I asked her.
"Yes," she said plainly.
"And did you spit it out?" I asked, hopeful.
"No," she answered.
"Where is it now?" I asked, less hopeful.
"In my throat," she said. At least it was helpful that she had a vocabulary that enabled her to respond so clearly.
This was the point at which I entered crazed ambivalence. 'Kids swallow coins all the time, right?' I asked myself.
'Oh, most definitely,' part of me said. The other part of me was already flagellating my own back with a horsewhip. What kind of mother would put a penny in her two-year-old's pocket?!
While the money-gulper went about her business, I went about mine--the business of calling those professionals in my life who know what to do in these situations. I started with my sister, who happens to be a pediatric triage nurse and answers questions from lax parents like me--and, I hope, much laxer ones--all day long.
She basically told me that this, too, shall pass (and you know the sense in which I mean that), and that I should watch for respiratory difficulty, vomiting, or fever. That was mildly reassuring, but any advice that contains the words "respiratory distress" is, well, distressing.
Next on the list were my in-laws. She is a retired teacher; he is a pediatrician. Surely one of them had dealt with this at some point? But alas, the doctor was not in the house, and my mother-in-law had been responsible enough a parent not to have faced the coin-in-the-throat scenario. She suggested feeding her a piece of bread to push it through in case it was still stuck in her esophagus.
Finally, I made the call with which I should have started, to NurseDirect, the 24-hour on-call service of our local HMO. These, of course, were the people we'd sue if anything happened to our little girl as a result of inaction, so they recommended, based on the fact that she was pointing down her throat and saying her mouth hurt, that we have her seen immediately.
So off my husband went (she chose him over me, probably because I was the one who indirectly got her in this mess) on his second trip to Immediate Care in less than a month. And he returned just over an hour later with a little girl festooned with stickers and a large chest X-ray which had indeed revealed a penny waiting patiently at the mouth of the stomach.
We fed her some peanut butter bread when she complained that it still hurt, and for a second--we hope it was the second in which the foreign object entered her stomach--she seemed in a world of pain. But then all was well, and she was as chipper as could be.
So for the next couple of days, I'll be on "poop patrol." I suppose it's my due and will reinforce an important lesson learned.
posted by Lisa Strandberg at 7:32 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home