My oldest son Tommy turns 27 years old this week. Since I featured a whole week of Sean when it was his birthday, I thought it was only fair if I did the same for the other two boys. All of these columns I'm posting this week are Father Knows Nothing columns that didn't quite make it into the book. This one is about emergency rooms...
I always thought Emergency Rooms were
supposed to be scary. They certainly seemed scary to me when I was a kid. We
used to go there as a family to wait for my little brother while he was being
stitched up every month or so. The waiting room was uncomfortable. Sick and
injured people moaned in pain and dripped blood on the floor. Nurses and
doctors came running in and out. Monitors beeped. Ambulance alarms whirred. And
everyone waited for hours.
That’s what I
was expecting the first time I accompanied Tommy to the Emergency Room to get
stitches. He was eight years old at the time and had a very deep cut in his
chin. I tried to prepare him emotionally for the whole Emergency Room
experience, but he looked at me like I was crazy. He had been there a few times
before with his mother and wasn’t concerned in the slightest. I gave him a
comforting hug.
“You are so
brave,” I said. “I’m so proud of you.”
He actually
rolled his eyes. That choked me up. This kid was like one of those cowboys in
the old time Westerns. His eyes were saying…“It’s just a flesh wound, Hoss; let
me dig out the bullet in peace. Now go out there and keep them rustlers away
from our herd.”
He was still
nonchalant when we walked into the Emergency Room and awaited our turn with the
triage nurse. He made small talk with her, wincing only slightly when she looked
at the gash on his chin.
“Does it hurt?”
she asked.
“A little,” he
said.
“A little?” I
thought to myself. “That thing is going to need ten stitches.”
“It’s a pretty
big cut,” she said, “but we’ll take care of it for you.”
“Are we going
back there?” he asked, pointing to the door behind her.
She nodded.
Uh oh, I
thought. Here it comes. Now he’s going to remember what happens behind those
doors; the needles, the prodding, the pain. I prepared for the hysterical
reaction. I saw how he behaved when some small thing went wrong, like his
macaroni touching the vegetables on his dinner plate, and could only imagine
what was coming. I hunkered down for the fit of all fits.
“Follow me,” she
said.
We followed her
through the door to the kid’s section of the Emergency Room. Suffice it to say,
it has changed a little over the past thirty years. The colorful walls were
painted with cartoon fish. The gigantic fish tank contained a rainbow of
tropical fish worthy of the Shedd Aquarium. It was like walking onto the set of
“Finding Nemo.”
When they opened
the curtain to his room, he was actually excited. He jumped onto the bed,
pressed the buttons to raise it to the level he preferred, adjusted the
television to the proper angle, and began changing channels. While the nurse
put the numbing agent on his chin, he was watching a Tom & Jerry cartoon on
the Cartoon Network.
“Do you have any
video games?” he asked.
I was about to
chastise him for his prima-donna demands when the nurse surprised me.
“Sure,” she
said. “What kind of video games do you like?”
“Do you have Super
Mario Brothers?” he asked.
“I’ll go get
it,” she said, and walked out of the room before I could even utter a response.
My boy looked up at me and smiled.
“Dad,” he said,
“You’re gonna love this one.”
I’ll admit it. I
found myself watching him progress through the levels of the video game instead
of watching the doctor stitch up his chin. When the stitching was done, the doctor told us it was OK to leave.
“After this next
level,” Tommy said.
She smiled and
said, “I’m sorry, but we need the bed.”
My son started
to get upset, so I put my hand on his shoulder to comfort him.
“Don’t worry,” I
said, “I’m sure you’ll injure yourself again. We’ll be back.”
“You promise,
Dad?” he asked.
“I promise,” I
said.
