Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Foamenting Discontent

You know how there come those days when you've had a busy, fun couple of weeks with people visiting and trips to the zoo and the trains and staying up late talking and watching movies together and it's all settling down and you vow, "Tonight's the night we go to bed early! Tonight's the night we get back on schedule!"

You know how that's the night a child always needs to go to Urgent Care?

It was Dot's turn. She's never been. Just before bedtime, she somehow managed to snort a piece of craft foam, much to her surprise. Her own efforts to dislodge it only bloodied her nose and made her more distraught. I arrived home in the middle of this (I had been at Bible study) and was, I confess, a little skeptical. We couldn't see it. Her nose had stopped bleeding. How did we know it was still there?

However, when it comes to handling emergencies, DOB is the specialist. This is because I refuse to believe emergencies are actually occurring, especially late at night. "Sure, it looks like that limb is severed, but we can probably put it back on with Super Glue. Or maybe it will look better in the morning." I'm better at routines. Whereas DOB gets all fired up at the prospect of a New Problem To Solve. And also believes that medical help is sometimes necessary.

So we called Their Majesties, who abandoned their supper to come sit with the other kids, and drove to Urgent Care. The other kids have gone to the ER, where it is slower because you are behind people with actual emergencies like heart attacks, whereas at Urgent Care snorted craft foam is more exciting than sprained wrists and earaches.

I was apprehensive about how Dot would take this.  She tends, as I have mentioned before, to be extremely difficult and unreasonable under stress and she had been cranky and tired before the incident occurred and completely bonkers afterwards, wailing "I can't DO anything!" until Deux managed to soothe her by reading enough Mother Goose poems. How would she take having her nose poked at?


Apparently she figured out that there was now something she could do. Because she lay still, serene as the Lady of Shalott, even though it took dozens of tries before the doctor could finally extract the foam. The doctor afterwards told her, "You are perfect, you know that?" She nodded smugly.

Today she was cranky and unreasonable again.

2 comments:

Carrie said...

Another laugh for the morning!

I'm the one who feels the necessity of taking children to the doctor sometimes whereas Jonathan likes to see how things are in the morning. I guess it's helpful to have one of both!

Diary of an Autodidact said...

Absolutely laugh-out-loud funny!

We are kind of the wait-and-see sort as well. Of course, Amanda is a nurse, so she is better at figuring out when something is really wrong than I am.