Bumps on the road

“Mom,” my daughter, the GAP, cried into the phone, “what should I do?”  I could hear screaming.  “The baby just fell out of the car on his head.”

“Take him to the hospital,” I said.  Then I took a deep breath.  “Is he bleeding?” I asked.

“No.”

“Are his pupils dilated?”

“No.”  We went through twenty questions quickly. 

“Call the urgent care nurse and see if she wants you to bring him in,” I said.

“I sat him on the front seat of the car for just a minute while I put the stroller in the back,” she sobbed.  “He managed to open the door, and fell out on the pavement.”  Any mother knows that feeling of “I wish I could do the last thirty seconds over; I’d do it differently.”

“Like his black eye wasn’t enough?”  I said half-laughing.  Just last night I’d stopped by.  The purple on his eyelid had turned to brownish-gold from when he’d walked into a chair.

“Guess not,” the GAP said.  Her crying had stopped, and the Mouse’s cries were less deafening.

I hung up the phone.  My heart pounded, and my mind raced.  Not only to the little banged up Mouse, but to a time long ago now.  I’d rushed Cheezy to Emergency for the third week in a row.  This time he’d split his head open when Hot Wheelz had chased him and he’d fallen on the edge of the metal bed frame.  I think the week before, he’d had his hand slammed in a door and his nail was hanging over his cuticle.  Or maybe that was the GAP.  After four children, all the emergencies began to run together.

The doctor had threatened to turn me in to social services.  Until Cheezy, while being examined, walked smack dab into the middle of the door frame and got a big knot between his eyebrows.

An hour later, the GAP called me back.  “What’d the doctor say?” I asked. 

“Just told me what to watch for,” she said.  “Dilated eyes.  Throwing up.  Slurred words and unsteadiness.” 

Since he doesn’t talk yet and he’s clumsy anyway those would be harder to recognize.  “So that means if he starts talking fluently and walks straight, we should be concerned?” I laughed.

“Exactly,” she said.

That night I met with a few friends, and was late.  I’d stopped by the GAP’s to see the Mouse’s battle scars.  He didn’t look too bad.  Looks like he gets his hard head from me.  But of course, I had to explain myself.

Soon we, all of us mothers, were embroiled in a contest.  “My two-year-old daughter broke her leg putting on her older sister’s shoe skate,” Cathi said.  “You know my shy one, Carrie.  What even made it worse was when I took her to the hospital, there was this little girl wringing her hands and looking sorrowfully at me.”  We were all laughing.  We knew Carrie, and we could imagine what the doctor was thinking.  “‘Tell us how this happened,’ the doctor kept asking this little stressed girl wringing her hands.”

Then Laurel joined in.  “We were visiting my mom in Chicago and all the adults attended a play, while three children under ten were left in the care of my two nieces, ages thirteen and eleven.  They tell us they were chicken fighting, when Scott, about five at the time, fell off the eight-year-old cousin’s shoulders.  ‘Does your arm usually look like this?’ the thirteen-year-old in-charge asked.  It was bowed, like this.”  She held up her forearm, rounding it.  “Well, my niece tried calling the theater, but they wouldn’t answer after the play started, so she dialed 911.  The Chicago police came.  They had to wait at the hospital until they could find out if the injury was bad enough to warrant going to the theater and interrupting the play.”  By this time, we were in stitches (punny).  “Scott could only take watching Hook so many times while he waited.”  You have to know that Scott is more than a little active.  “Finally, he could take it no more, and said, ‘Let’s get outta this place,’” laughed Laurel.  “By the time we got home, it was midnight.  This year, the now grown up eight-year-old shared the story at Scott’s wedding.  He told us he was hiding under the bed, because he was sure Uncle Eric would not be happy with him.”

“The last time we were visiting,” Linda said, not to be outdone, “my youngest grandson ate a bottle of pills.  The poison center had to be called and the police came…”

“I know that one,” exclaimed Cathi.  “I was really sick, and left Randy in charge of the kids.”  We mothers can envision what happens when a husband is left in charge of children.  “She ate some of my pills.  So Randy called the poison center and read them what she’d eaten.  By then it’d been long enough, they said, that throwing the pills up would do no good.  The nurse ensured us she would be okay, but to expect some weird side effects.  We laid her on the bed, and she literally couldn’t move anything but her eyeballs.  Once we knew she’d be okay, it was really funny.  We posed her little hands like a ballerina, and they would stick that way.”  Okay, so it sounded a little odd for a mother and father to do that, but I suppose with all the things kids do to us as parents, it was a little pre-retribution.  “She still talks about it, and gives us the eye.” 

With fifteen children between us, we could have gone on well into the morning hours about near misses.  The only thing we were more certain of after last night was that there is a God.  Otherwise we would have no grandchildren.

Related posts:

1. Going out on klutz leave
2. Levitating grandma
3. Leave them alone
4. Everything you ever wanted to be
5. Family glue