emergency
We've had bad luck with kitchen timers over the last few months.
The old faithful failed after years of service when it fell off the fridge, breaking an internal weld that was beyond my soldering skills to repair for more than a few days at a time. A replacement with the same model failed in exactly the same way after just a few weeks. So I went for a whole different brand, a promising model that featured a quadruple countdown/count up timers, an alarm clock, and several different options in the beeping department.
This impressive bit of microchippery was unfortunately housed in the all-around flimsiest, most poorly thought-out plastic case ever molded in the Pearl River Delta. To attach the timer to metal appliances like the ones you might find in a kitchen, it featured a magnet, less than a half inch square, with roughly a quarter ounce more holding power that the weight of the thing it was supposed to hold up. And to attach the magnet to the timer, it featured a tiny sheet of adhesive with slightly less holding power than the magnet itself.
If you shut the fridge with just a hair too much force, the crappy magnet would go sliding down the face of the door; if you whipped the door open too joyously, the adhesive would fail and the thing would go flying. All of which might have been fine, except that the battery cover was designed and assembled with as much care as the rest of the thing, so it never fit together right after the first time it went tumbling apart.
Sometime after breakfast on Wednesday, without my noticing it, the adhesive failed again. But J noticed, and he toddled on into the bathroom, where I was taking a break at the time, to show me the cool phone-looking thing he had found on the kitchen floor. The battery cover was missing, and so were the two tiny watch batteries, each about the exact size of a cheerio.
Back in the kitchen, I immediately found one of them, right next to the battery cover, directly below the magnet that was still sitting attached to the fridge door. The other battery: nowhere. Not anywhere on the floor, not under the fridge or stove, not under the eaves of the cabinets, not under wagons or trikes or hidden among toys on the ground, not with a flashlight, not with my face pressed to the ground, not nohow. Not in the box of connecting beads, not in the sortable shapes, not in any train payload or stuffed animal lap, not rolled into a corner or behind a chair. Just, nowhere.
Of course he ate it, who wouldn't? And then he came and offered me some like he does with everything he eats.
J seemed fine, no weird breathing, not acting out of sorts in any way. Assuming it had passed cleanly into him, nothing would likely happen for a while in any case. I checked the remaining battery to see whether it was lead or lithium, not that I would have had anything to do with that information, but it wasn't apparent anyway. The only inscription was the type, AG13, and the little positive and negative signs. I fairly calmly called our pediatrician and asked whether, as I assumed, this meant Emergency Room, which of course it did. They recommended Children's Memorial over the closer Northwestern hospital, since if he needed surgery they would have to transfer him anyway.
With J already climbing and diving and crashing without fear, a second boy on the way, and a strong thrill-seeking streak running through the family, E and I had talked about looking into frequent-flyer plans for the ER, but this first terrified drive convinced me it's nothing to joke about. My sense of anything but the coarsest outlines of the Chicago street grid evaporated, so I just pointed the car in the general direction of where I thought Children's Memorial probably was and made turns almost at random until I got there, based sheerly on the need to keep moving. And this was with a calm little dude in the back seat just drinking his bottle and wondering why were going for a ride right before naptime. I can't even imagine the scene if he had been screaming. What kind of irresponsible moron was I to think I could take a nice leisurely shit and let a 14-month old walk around the kitchen on his own?
You know what, though? Aside from the soul-wracking fear and self-recriminations, pediatric ER was not so bad. Way better than the adult version, and orders of magnitude faster. The nurses were sweet to him and knew how to do their workups without freaking him out. The attending physician had ordered the x-rays before we even got back to the exam room, and everybody we met was a perfect mix of calm competence and nurturing care.
The nurse after the triage nurse was happy to explain to me just where we were at: the first thing they worry about in this situation (known in the industry as something like "swallowed foreign body, unspecified") is that the swallowed body might be blocking the airway. Then they want to know that it's not stuck in the esophagus. Once that's all out of the way they can start thinking about what happens if a tiny metal pellet filled with lead acid is sitting in stomach juices for too long, which could be either something with a scope or something with a knife. So after they made sure he was breathing fine, it was down the hall to radiology.
In the x-ray room, decorated in an undersea theme that had J talking bathtime with the tech as soon as we hit the door, we strapped the boy into a contraption that would be just perfect for simultaneous crucifixion-electrocutions: a seat with velcro straps at legs and waist, and above that a pair of struts with two more sets of straps, which completely immobilized his arms vertically on either side of his head. J happily went along as we locked him down like a tiny Hannibal Lecter, chattering to us about the fish and the pulpos and the seahorses even after he was draped in lead and forcibly prevented from pointing at them. The only thing that got him upset was when we had to lay him on his back for one final stomach shot, which made him think I was going to change his diaper.
The tech thought there was nothing there, but we had to wait for the radiologist. Fifteen minutes later, the radiologist said there was nothing inside the boy that shouldn't be. Fifteen more minutes, after a nice chat with the doctor and the token distribution of aftercare instructions, we were dressed and out of there. (I just realized this, but do not yet necessarily ascribe it any significance: from one end of the professional spectrum to the other, every single person we dealt with in the course of this episode, on the phone or in person, with the exception of a security guard and the person taking our insurance information, was female. Does this say something about the pediatric speciality, or is it just random scheduling chance?)
J fell asleep in the car on the way home, since it was nearly three hours past naptime by then. He woke briefly as I got him out of his car seat, looked around groggily, then fell back asleep against me and went down into his crib without a whimper, which itself was a first.
Picking up a little after he was down, I came across the lost battery on the bathroom floor, nowhere near where it started and not in a place where it could possibly have rolled.
The old faithful failed after years of service when it fell off the fridge, breaking an internal weld that was beyond my soldering skills to repair for more than a few days at a time. A replacement with the same model failed in exactly the same way after just a few weeks. So I went for a whole different brand, a promising model that featured a quadruple countdown/count up timers, an alarm clock, and several different options in the beeping department.
This impressive bit of microchippery was unfortunately housed in the all-around flimsiest, most poorly thought-out plastic case ever molded in the Pearl River Delta. To attach the timer to metal appliances like the ones you might find in a kitchen, it featured a magnet, less than a half inch square, with roughly a quarter ounce more holding power that the weight of the thing it was supposed to hold up. And to attach the magnet to the timer, it featured a tiny sheet of adhesive with slightly less holding power than the magnet itself.
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| Master J in a new kind of onesie |
Sometime after breakfast on Wednesday, without my noticing it, the adhesive failed again. But J noticed, and he toddled on into the bathroom, where I was taking a break at the time, to show me the cool phone-looking thing he had found on the kitchen floor. The battery cover was missing, and so were the two tiny watch batteries, each about the exact size of a cheerio.
Back in the kitchen, I immediately found one of them, right next to the battery cover, directly below the magnet that was still sitting attached to the fridge door. The other battery: nowhere. Not anywhere on the floor, not under the fridge or stove, not under the eaves of the cabinets, not under wagons or trikes or hidden among toys on the ground, not with a flashlight, not with my face pressed to the ground, not nohow. Not in the box of connecting beads, not in the sortable shapes, not in any train payload or stuffed animal lap, not rolled into a corner or behind a chair. Just, nowhere.
Of course he ate it, who wouldn't? And then he came and offered me some like he does with everything he eats.
J seemed fine, no weird breathing, not acting out of sorts in any way. Assuming it had passed cleanly into him, nothing would likely happen for a while in any case. I checked the remaining battery to see whether it was lead or lithium, not that I would have had anything to do with that information, but it wasn't apparent anyway. The only inscription was the type, AG13, and the little positive and negative signs. I fairly calmly called our pediatrician and asked whether, as I assumed, this meant Emergency Room, which of course it did. They recommended Children's Memorial over the closer Northwestern hospital, since if he needed surgery they would have to transfer him anyway.
With J already climbing and diving and crashing without fear, a second boy on the way, and a strong thrill-seeking streak running through the family, E and I had talked about looking into frequent-flyer plans for the ER, but this first terrified drive convinced me it's nothing to joke about. My sense of anything but the coarsest outlines of the Chicago street grid evaporated, so I just pointed the car in the general direction of where I thought Children's Memorial probably was and made turns almost at random until I got there, based sheerly on the need to keep moving. And this was with a calm little dude in the back seat just drinking his bottle and wondering why were going for a ride right before naptime. I can't even imagine the scene if he had been screaming. What kind of irresponsible moron was I to think I could take a nice leisurely shit and let a 14-month old walk around the kitchen on his own?
You know what, though? Aside from the soul-wracking fear and self-recriminations, pediatric ER was not so bad. Way better than the adult version, and orders of magnitude faster. The nurses were sweet to him and knew how to do their workups without freaking him out. The attending physician had ordered the x-rays before we even got back to the exam room, and everybody we met was a perfect mix of calm competence and nurturing care.
The nurse after the triage nurse was happy to explain to me just where we were at: the first thing they worry about in this situation (known in the industry as something like "swallowed foreign body, unspecified") is that the swallowed body might be blocking the airway. Then they want to know that it's not stuck in the esophagus. Once that's all out of the way they can start thinking about what happens if a tiny metal pellet filled with lead acid is sitting in stomach juices for too long, which could be either something with a scope or something with a knife. So after they made sure he was breathing fine, it was down the hall to radiology.
In the x-ray room, decorated in an undersea theme that had J talking bathtime with the tech as soon as we hit the door, we strapped the boy into a contraption that would be just perfect for simultaneous crucifixion-electrocutions: a seat with velcro straps at legs and waist, and above that a pair of struts with two more sets of straps, which completely immobilized his arms vertically on either side of his head. J happily went along as we locked him down like a tiny Hannibal Lecter, chattering to us about the fish and the pulpos and the seahorses even after he was draped in lead and forcibly prevented from pointing at them. The only thing that got him upset was when we had to lay him on his back for one final stomach shot, which made him think I was going to change his diaper.
The tech thought there was nothing there, but we had to wait for the radiologist. Fifteen minutes later, the radiologist said there was nothing inside the boy that shouldn't be. Fifteen more minutes, after a nice chat with the doctor and the token distribution of aftercare instructions, we were dressed and out of there. (I just realized this, but do not yet necessarily ascribe it any significance: from one end of the professional spectrum to the other, every single person we dealt with in the course of this episode, on the phone or in person, with the exception of a security guard and the person taking our insurance information, was female. Does this say something about the pediatric speciality, or is it just random scheduling chance?)
J fell asleep in the car on the way home, since it was nearly three hours past naptime by then. He woke briefly as I got him out of his car seat, looked around groggily, then fell back asleep against me and went down into his crib without a whimper, which itself was a first.
Picking up a little after he was down, I came across the lost battery on the bathroom floor, nowhere near where it started and not in a place where it could possibly have rolled.
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