« What I Hate More Than Anything Else | Home | Northeastward Ho »
08.03.09
Baby’s First Missteps
posted by Absinthe | 2:14 PM
It happens like this: He’s running. Something catches his eye – a flash of light, a previously unseen dog. It doesn’t matter what, and nobody will ever know what it is. Maybe he’s just looking over his shoulder to say, mommy, look at me, I’m running. He looks back and there is a shift in angular momentum. And then a stumble as he veers toward the guardrail of the boardwalk, and his feet do not cooperate, and the stumble turns into a trip. It’s an unlikely set of circumstances, a one-in-a-million shot or worse, else we’d all be walking around looking like he does today.
And it’d be nothing more than a knee-scrape anyway but for the perfectly placed metal box. The box is blue and grilled, a housing for an air-conditioning unit or the like. It is maybe two feet high, and it is the only sharp-cornered metal object for 50 yards in any direction. Its continued presence in a park-playground area is testament to its unlikelihood as an engine of misery. To injure yourself on it, you’d need to be less than three feet tall, be running and stumble going a particular direction, miss a guardrail and hit the edge or corner of the box at a nearly right angle.
If that happened – if all those conditions lined up – then you would suddenly find yourself sprawled on the ground with blood in your eyes, your stricken mother enlisting those nearby to call 911 and help keep pressure on the gash halfway between your right eyebrow and your hairline. You’d shake and cry and hyperventilate, but somehow retain enough awareness to tell the strange men (who look like policeman but act like doctors) that yes, you hurt, and what hurts is the area that you are pointing at on your head. But for the stack of paper towels (and the hand of your father, who came upon this scene unawares, returned from a quick supply run and expecting to pick up wife and son and go on to the grocery store), you could reach up to the wound and touch the shiny whiteness of your skull.
An ambulance ride, a long wait in the emergency room. No one has eaten, the child because he may need to be sedated for surgery, the parents because they are afraid to leave the room for a single second. The child wants to eat, to go home, to feel better; the parents want the same. The child is not only unfed but unmedicated – cut to the bone and without the solace of so much as a milligram of Tylenol. The child, at this moment, is his father’s hero, despite his occasional bouts of tearful frustration and rage.
Finally a plastic surgeon arrives, and the child endures the incomprehensible indignities of monitors and IVs and bright lights and people inspecting his now exposed wound. Then his parents endure half an hour of a ketamine-addled boy calling out “mama, mama” over and over. And then another three hours of waiting for release, during which the mother rallies and finds a new book that delights the awakening boy. The father, meanwhile, finally succumbs to the adrenaline and spends most of an hour dry-heaving in a distressingly septic bathroom.
Everyone smiles all the way home.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Topics: Human Interests | 5 Comments »
August 3, 2009 at 3:56 PM
Ack. The wife and I send all the well-wishes in the world to the little one and the rest of the family. Hugs from the midwest for all of you!
August 4, 2009 at 1:15 AM
Good vibes go out to lil’ man.
August 4, 2009 at 8:25 AM
That sucks man. Being the parent of two have been there. I kinda have to laugh because I had like 6 sets of stitches as a kid. My mom must have been a wreck. Hope the little guy is doing well.
August 4, 2009 at 9:13 AM
So glad everything’s OK. Been there with broken arms, bleeding out the ear after head impact, and hosts of other things parents endure.
Kids are tougher than we think sometimes.
August 4, 2009 at 10:59 AM
I cringed through every word of this. You should all take a mental health day…far away from anything metal.