My Lucky Rock
After hearing all Jim’s childhood stories, I teased him that he was raised by the idyllic Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie and Violet (their real names), provided a comfortable, suburban, middle class life for their family, and didn’t seem to make many child-rearing mistakes. The time Jim was at a Sears store playing on the escalator while his mother shopped nearby, was the only questionable parenting decision I am aware of (sister Joanne may disagree with this). It was winter and Jim was five. He was going up and down the escalator like his mother told him not to, and his heavy coat became stuck in the handrail. Before he could get out of the coat or the moving stairs could be stopped, his arm snapped like a pretzel. I never heard what exactly was done to retrieve him, because when he told the story, his main point was always that he was not taken for an X-ray right then and there. It wasn’t dangling at the break and there was still circulation, so how would anyone know? Almost a week later, after moping around holding it, his parents decided maybe the ailing arm should be checked after all. The arm had begun healing itself and had to be rebroken and set, to heal properly. Ouch. Ozzie and Vie were pretty logical and realistic like that.
My parents, however, seemed to be a little more affected by their childhoods. Both my parents lost siblings at very young ages–my mother lost a five-year-old sister due to Scarlet Fever. I know this had to be the reason she freaked out when one of us kids had a rash. It didn’t matter, we were rushed to the doctor. To the best of my recollection, the doctor’s office was for previous appointments like school physicals and immunizations; the emergency room was for every other little thing.
I wouldn’t call my mother a hypochondriac; she hated to take medication and didn’t particularly think she ever needed to go to the doctor, even when she did. She wouldn’t take care of herself. Her children were another story. She protected us at all cost; even unrealistically so. I was in fifth grade and remember playing with a friend who was spending the night with me. When we were getting ready for bed, I pulled off a pair of dress boots I’d had on all day, and noticed a red rash on my legs. That was all it took for my mother to think I had Scarlet Fever. She didn’t check to see if I had a FEVER. Off we went to the emergency room to wait. The ward clerk took all my pertinent information and probably put my papers underneath the stack of babies needing to be born, colds, and paper cuts. By the time I was finally seen, I’m not sure the rash could still be seen. It didn’t take long to tell us it must have only been a heat rash. So began my earliest lessons that everything is not an emergency, illness, or disease and everything does not require a doctor’s opinion. There wasn’t much realistic logic involved in the way we handled routine sickness.
Another time we turned the emergency flashers on and honked all the way to the hospital, passing cars left and right, was the time I swallowed a rock. Yep, that’s right, a rock. I was lying on the couch one evening during seventh grade, with a flat, polished stone in my mouth. It was a pretty thing, one of those multi-colored polished stones you can get at a tourist gift shop from a basket right next to the basket of fool’s gold. I called it my lucky rock. Well, anyway, in my defense, I didn’t just swallow it. There was a very good reason I swallowed it. I was watching an episode of Sanford and Son and Lamonte said . . . well, it doesn’t matter what he said . . . it was FUNNY. I laughed and the rock was gone. I felt it stick momentarily in the back of my throat, so I jumped up and attempted to hack it back up. It didn’t work. It was really gone. I didn’t enjoy telling my parents, but I trusted they would know what to do. After getting the whole story out of me about why a twelve-year-old might have a rock in her mouth, we loaded up the truck and headed to the ER.
Umhuh, I was put in charge of finding that darn rock with a ruler. My sister wants me to emphasize it was a metal ruler, not wooden. Some lucky rock. I never did find it, but after a couple of days, I didn’t care if it would block an intestine or gross things would gather around and collect on it and it would become a 20 pound tumor. So yeah, it was a hard lesson to learn, but everything isn’t an emergency, illness, or disease and everything doesn’t require a doctor’s opinion.
By the time I put a brand new X-acto blade in my knife and drew it down the metal T-square holding a mat board, I think my family had a pretty good grip on what the emergency room was actually for. The index finger on my left hand that was holding the T-square was overlapping the metal. The quick, clean slice was perfect. There was no pain, blood, or evidence of a severed finger. Until I went to the sink and ran water over it and the side separated from the bone. I had enough sense to quickly catch the piece of finger before it went down the drain, and enough sense to put it aside so I could take it to the hospital. The blood began pouring and the pain set in and by then I didn’t have enough sense to actually leave the house with the fragmented finger. This was one time my parents took me to the emergency room and really should have. I’m sure the emergency flashers were again keeping time with one another and many cars were passed as my dad drove us toward the ER. My mother was applying pressure and held my throbbing hand above my heart. Or was it my head? I’m pretty sure my hand was well above my head.
The emergency room staff wanted the finger. It was a little embarrassing to admit I’d saved it from the drain just to leave it on the kitchen sink. We called my sister to bring it in a cold glass of milk or water. Why she thought water was best, I’ll never know, because she had to attempt to not watch the piece of severed flesh floating in the clear liquid in the clear glass. By the time she arrived, she was as white as a little green frog that jumped into a chlorinated swimming pool for a few days and as nauseous as if she’d eaten the frog alive. The ER staff stopped prepping my finger to attend to her. Once they’d kept her from passing out, they reattached my finger with a dozen stitches and sent us all home.
I’m proud to say we were making progress on how to appropriately use an emergency room. My parents still asked if we wanted them to take us to the ER every time my sister or I had a sniffle, but I had become strong and declined every time . . . except when we though I aspirated a strawberry.
Once my and Jim’s lives blended together, I think we did a pretty good job of finding a “happy medium” about a lot of things. He was rarely ever sick or went to work anyway. What?!? Once I’d learned illness had such an effect on my parents, I had begun implementing my “plan” in high school:
I would often wake up on a school day and say, “I don’t think I’ll go to school today–I’m not feeling well.”
“Why don’t you just stay home on the couch?”, would be the response. And it became a habit.
I had to learn that every time my children were sick, they did not need to go to the doctor. If they had a fever, I kept them home and treated them with an over-the-counter aspirin substitute. I think they developed a healthy, realistic way to approach illness. And finally, so did their parents.
Then there was that time on vacation our oldest son had a stomach ache. He didn’t feel like eating, and just laid on the floor of the cabin. He may say now that he was nauseous, but I don’t remember it that way. The aches didn’t seem terribly severe and he didn’t have a fever, and his uncle who is not only an RN but also trained in Eastern medicine, took a look at him. He prodded around and decided a certain type of seed should be taped inside his ears. Calen slept through the night, but the next morning he wasn’t any better. We drove an hour from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to a clinic in Wisconsin. They sent us on another hour and a half trip to a hospital where he underwent emergency surgery for a rupturing appendix.
We found out Calen had a very high tolerance of pain. And I felt as guilty for not taking him to the hospital that first night as I am sure his grandmother felt when his dad’s arm had to be rebroken. He still likes to rub it in that we left him to die on the floor with seeds in his ears when he wants to invoke guilt, but we just laugh at him. Then we all add our two cents worth of telling our own versions of his story.
I don’t know when the last time was, that I was inside an ER.
Reminder to self: Some things are emergencies and do require a doctor’s opinion and all rocks are not lucky rocks.
