Going to the emergency room in the middle of the night is a parental right of passage, but it’s one I would have preferred to skip.
We had put the kids to bed and we were settled in to watch the second half of the LSU-Michigan basketball game, when my son wandered out of his bedroom to tell us his throat hurt. Thinking he was just doing his usual bedtime shenanigans in order to avoid going to sleep, I told him to go get a glass of water.
It was then that he said it hurt because he had swallowed a coin. And it hurt.
A lot of parenting is being like the duck on the pond. On the surface, you look like you are calmly floating on the top of the water. But underneath, you are paddling like mad.
There’s the sudden moment of genuine fear and panic which at the same time, you can’t let them see. If you panic, you kids will panic. And panic is death. In this case, maybe literally. I didn’t know.
And that was the reality staring me in the face in the moment: how little I actually know. But there I was, googling “child swallows coin” like a moron. Was he going to choke to death? Should I call an ambulance? Take him to the ER? Do nothing and wait for him to poop it out?
What coin did he swallow? He doesn’t know, does that make a difference? It turns out the US government changed how it minted pennies in 1982 and they are now made from zinc, which is toxic. Did you know that? Well, I didn’t. But after a google search I did.
How did that help me? I mean, now I had to worry if he swallowed a penny or a nickel. Not that he knew. He just knew it hurt. Should I try to dislodge it? Give him water? Slap his back?
I really didn’t know. I’m supposed to know these things. He counts on me to now these things, and here I was, completely ignorant of the things I actually need to know in life. I know LSU’s Ken Pomeroy rankings and the preferred tempo of Michigan and LSU’s offenses, but that knowledge proved to be pretty useless last night.
We drove to the emergency room. Or where I thought the emergency room was, but it turns out that the hospital had been converted to an orthopedic outpatient center and, well, this wasn’t orthopedics.
My failures as a parent extended to the fact I didn’t know where the hospital was. This should be pretty basic information. Instead, I sat in the orthopedic center’s parking lot, trying to google map “emergency rooms near me.” Like a complete asshole.
You simply don’t know the massive gaps in your own knowledge until you are confronted with them, and those gaps are terrifying in the moment. When your child looks at you with those big blue eyes, tearing welling within them, and tells you that he’s scared, his throat really hurts, and he wants you to hold him… well, you hold him.
And you project confidence. You tell him its gonna be okay. You tell him not to worry. You lie because, well, what else are you going to do? Let him know that you are utterly terrified? That you don’t even know where the doctor is?
Ultimately, we got to the emergency room and everyone there was wonderful. Th nurses were kind and compassionate, and made him feel comfortable from the moment we arrived. The doctor actually was knowledgeable, a big step up from the father, but he also made Lil Poseur feel safe every step of the way. He even made Daddy feel better.
They took an X-ray of his stomach, which didn’t hurt, just like they promised. And there it was, the coin wasn’t lodged in his esophagus, as I was worried, and the internet had warned me was really bad. All we had to do was wait for him to poop it out, but he should be fine until then.
It’s all he needed to hear. As soon as Lil Poseur was told that it was going to be okay by a genuine authority figure who knew what the heck he was talking about, he wasn’t so scared. The pain in his throat magically went away. His tummy hurt, but he wiped the tears away. He knew he would be okay. Just hearing the news made him feel better.
It made me feel better, too.
I don’t know what his next crisis will be, but I’m sure I will be just as spectacularly unprepared for it as this one. Except maybe next time I will know where the hospital is.
I am the duck. And I’m just paddling as hard as I can because I don’t know what else to do.
