Bits of Life

Standing Appointment at the ER Any family with three or more boys should make a standing appointment at the hospital emergency room (ER), keep a handy supply of Maalox, tranquilizers and pray a lot. For years, I was a standing joke in my former neighborhood because of my weekly trips to the ER with one of the boys. The doctor in the ER was a personal friend of ours and advised me “To begin using a sand filled sock if I was going to continue to beat the children because it doesn’t leave much of a mark.” When I moved, a former neighbor wrote to say how much she missed seeing my car roar by with the latest accident victim. That’s the kind of comments I can live without. There is always one child in every family who is a daredevil. (That’s the child with the old gray-haired mother.) In our family, it’s the middle child. In one week, he broke some kind of record for accidents. He was barely learning to walk when he fell off the top shelf of our floor to ceiling bookcase, had stitches, removed same stitches, bumped into a door knob which blacken his eye and ate a part of the deodorizer in the toilet bowl. I knew that one of us would never live long at this rate. I really suspected that I would be the first fatality since he always had the first emergency treatment. At age 5, he decided that he could fly. His first attempt was made from the top of my antique couch which resulted in my best table lamp being broken. He was Peter Pan that day and I literally wished he had flown to Never-Never Land. Then we had to replace the neighbor’s storm door because he jumped through it (He was Batman then.) I have never understood how he managed that without a scratch (perhaps by then his little body was toughened by so many previous stitches.) In any case, he was so proud of himself that he re-enacted the scene with the neighbor’s son taking a picture of him. At age 8, he had moved to bigger and better things. We had just moved to another town when a large German Shepherd attacked our tiny dog. The daredevil lost his temper and socked the beast in the face. (I wouldn’t even go near the dog because of his size.) After other attacks on our car by the same dog, we decided to buy a can of dog repellent spray. The boys were lookouts but I was the only one authorized to use the spray. Then days went by and the dog was nowhere in sight. One afternoon, the three boys and I were running errands. I stopped at a store and left the daredevil and his other two brothers in the car. (The older brother was supposed to be in charge.) Just minutes after I entered the store, the youngest child made an entrance which would make a hailstorm sound like a summer rain. He was screaming, shrieking and crying so loudly that no one could understand him. I found my oldest son and the daredevil still in the car frantically reading the dog spray can ingredients searching for the antidote listing. The daredevil explained that he was demonstrating the correct way to use the spray and accidentally sprayed his brother in the face and mouth. On the way to the ER. I ran every red light in town blowing my horn all the way. When we arrived, the ER doctor {by then my new best friend) calmed me and called the Poison Control Center. (The spray which I had bought had just come on the market so the doctor didn’t have the antidote recorded.) As we left the ER, I heard the doctor say “Keep that number for the Poison Control Center handy.” Once again, we had established ourselves in a new neighborhood.