A Dangerous Business

Raising boys is a dangerous business. It's mentally dangerous for the parents, but it's physically dangerous for the boys, if our many trips to the ER are any indication. Emergency--a strange word, when you consider the root is "emerge" (which is what the ER has been shorted to--as in, "Didn't I see you in Emerge last night?"). A quick google of the word turns up several synonyms, among which are "flow, gush, spurt"--I assume this is the connection. After all, we made many trips to the ER with boys gushing and spurting blood all over the back seat.

We learned things along the way. For instance, never wash the blood off--it gets you past the desk in record time. If you need to, slather on some ketchup. Also, be prepared to endure some hard looks and questions when you drag a toddler with facial lacerations into the ER at 2am. Apparently falling face-first from the top bunk into a pile of lego sounds dodgy at that hour. Don't take it personally--the tired staff are merely doing their job. Another good idea is to send chocolates to the nurses on their birthdays--remember, it's all about building relationships.

Our ER champ is Primero. He and Cuarto were neck-and-neck there for a while during childhood, but Primero's adult stint as a chef put him ahead--apparently sharp knives, a hurried atmosphere and improperly-grounded appliances make for perilous working conditions. He pulled ahead of Cuarto and has retained the top position since. Tercero is a distant third—most of his trips to the ER were garnered in his teenage years, doing things that are best left unsaid. Segundo, always the most watchful of the four, never went to Emerge, although he did snap a finger tendon once poking a brother (I forget which one—these sorts of incidents were too numerous to keep track) in the ribs.

It was Primero who introduced us to the world of emerge/ncy. By the time he was five, he was a seasoned veteran. His first visit was when he smashed his face against the bathtub, opening up an impressively spurting gash that refused to stop bleeding. We bundled him up (he was our only child at that point) and hauled him into the hospital--Jack repeated his personal best of 20 minutes from our house to the ER doors, first accomplished when I was in labour with Primero. Luckily, it was a slow night, and the ER doctor stitched up the wound in record time. I was impressed with his sewing skills--he was good. Primero didn't even have time to shriek.

The second time was the infamous Skil saw incident. Jack was building the first of many additions to our house (see blog post “The House that Jack Built”) and had left his Skil saw up on the top of a framed wall, its cord dangling down. Three-year-old Primero, wandering around chomping on a carrot, found the end of the cord and yanked. The saw fell smack on his upturned face.

I was in the house, changing Segundo’s diaper, when Jack ran in, white-faced, clutching Primero to his blood-soaked shirt.

“What happened?” I yelled. Jack lay Primero down on the floor and began digging in his mouth. There was blood everywhere. “What happened?” I yelled again. Jack shook his head and just kept digging.

Jack pulled something small and bloody from Primero’s mouth. “Oh my God, he’s bitten OFF HIS TONGUE!” I shrieked. Jack looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “It’s a carrot!” he said. “I didn’t want him to choke! Geez, what’s the matter with you?” He threw the bloody chunk (in my defense, I maintain that the carrot was the size of a three-year-old’s tongue, it was lacerated and bloody—any jury would agree with my initial reaction) into the toilet and scooped up Primero, who by now was screaming bloody (pun completely intended) murder.

“Grab the baby—we need to get this kid to emergency!” We threw baby Segundo into his car seat and strapped Primero into the back. This was before children required car seats until they graduated from high school. As Jack hurtled down the highway (we did a lot of that back then), I sat sideways in my seat, patting Primero’s arm, trying to see if he was going into shock. Jack, hunched over the wheel in his blood-drenched shirt, zoomed past cars as if they were standing still.

We reached the ER in new record time. Jack easily broke his In-Labour-With-Primero record that day. In fact, the Primero/Skil saw trip record would stand unbroken for the remainder of our time in Herbert—for all I know, it’s unbroken to this day.

The ER nurses, seeing the blood, hollered “This way!” and scurried ahead, showing us to an empty cubicle. In no time, a doctor was there, peeling away the towels we’d wrapped Primero’s bleeding face in. The sight made me clutch Segundo even harder than I was. He squawked in protest. As the doctor began washing away the blood while listening to Jack’s narrative, Primero’s little face became visible. “Oh my God!” I said.

“Believe it or not,” the doctor said, “there’s very little real damage. I think the carrot absorbed most of the impact.” Jack looked at me. “It looked like a tongue.” I muttered. He kept washing away more blood. And more. And more. “Head and face wounds always bleed the most,” he said cheerfully. “We’ve got a small puncture in the lip—likely from the tooth behind. Also, the tooth is a little loose, but it looks alright for now. We’ll stitch up the puncture, and he should be okay.” As he began sewing, I recognized his technique—it was the same doctor we’d had on Primero’s first visit. The guy was good.

Primero would go on to have more trips to Emerge, but none would be as dramatic (thank God!). Segundo, thankfully, was a different kid altogether. As a child, he always assessed situations before he acted—it saved him a lot of blood over the years. While Primero would always be a leaper instead of a looker, Segundo never leaped until he’d looked very carefully indeed.

As a child, Tercero was too smart to get hurt. He only started injuring himself when he became a teenager, which is when kids undergo a kind of brain-death anyway, so it was understandable. Cuarto, on the other hand, was a lot like Primero, but without the same opportunities for injury. By the time Cuarto came along, the house was no longer a major construction zone, although the finishing would not be done until it was time to move (a pattern that we have since followed slavishly). Cuarto’s trips to Emerge were less dramatic.

His first was when he shoved a piece of hard rubber ball (they were called “Teeny-bouncers” for those who remember) his brothers had left lying on the floor after they’d shattered it with a hammer. He shoved it in so far we couldn’t get it out, even with tweezers. So, off to the ER we went, although no speed records were broken that day. As the doctor blew up the balloon catheter (the only thing that would pull out the fragment), Cuarto’s eyes bulged along with his nose. All I could think of was the scene from Total Recall, where Arnold Schwartzenegger digs up his nose and yanks out some kind of tracking device. “How much do you want to bet he never does THIS again?” the doctor said, as he carefully pulled out the piece of Teeny-bouncer. He was right.

Cuarto would visit the ER several times—falling on Lego in the middle of the night (“Where did you land?” asks concerned parent, wanting to know what anatomical part was hurt. “ON THE FLOOR!” wails injured and literal-minded child); punching a hole in his middle finger (the bird-flipping digit) while slamming a pocket door; chipping a tooth shovelling snow while holding the handle in his mouth; almost losing his boys while straddling the picket fence and its opening gate—he has an interesting scar to this day because of that one; and other more minor injuries. As you can see, Cuarto’s childhood ER adventures trumped Primero’s, although none would come quite as close to panic and sheer terror as Primero’s adventure with the saw.

Of course, all the boys had their scrapes and scabs, sprains and minor lacerations. Every fall, when I would take them to Doctor Heather for their pre-school check-up, she’d check their shins for bruises and abrasions. “If I don’t find these, I get worried.” She said. “That means the kid isn’t active enough.” Doctor Heather never had to worry about the boys. She’d send me home with some worming medicine (“Worm pets and kids in the fall!” she’d chirp), and that was that until next year.

I often think of Doctor Heather looking for signs of life in kids. I know some parents today (and there were those back then, too) who freak out if their kid trips and falls. I admire those parents who react with equanimity to the many trips and falls their children take, and who so teach their kids that life has its ups and downs. I think of all the injuries The Little Moron Club endured—falling out of trees, off roofs (wait a minute—that was Joe, come to think of it), off their bikes; smashing their fingers with hammers , rocks and bricks; tripping over their own feet; getting pierced by fish-hooks; slicing open thumbs with new Swiss Army knives—the list goes on and on, injuries too numerous to recount.

They all made it to adulthood fairly intact (well, physically, anyway). And no doubt they learned about the physics of the world—gravity is a law, sharp things cut, bones break, skin is soft, heads are not as hard as bricks, etc.

This is not to say that the world can’t be an extremely dangerous place for children, or that we should be cavalier about their safety. We learned to child-proof (as much as possible) a home construction site. We also learned that giving the boys their own little tools and showing them how they work went a long way toward keeping them away from the adult tools. I still have a mental picture of a diapered Segundo sitting on the plywood subfloor of some addition (there were so many), doggedly pounding in nails with a ball-peen hammer, so many that the floor shimmered like chain-mail once he was done.

And I also think that each child has a platoon of guardian angels assigned to him or her—some kids’ platoons may be larger than others—but they all have one. I imagine these angels, punching in and out of their celestial time-clock (like those sheepdogs Sam and George in the Looney Tunes cartoons), making sure that their charges survive until lunchtime, when they’re off the clock. It’s the only thing that can explain the more hair-raising close calls.

The world is a dangerous place. And, as insurance underwriters tell us, most accidents happen in the home. So home AND the world are dangerous places. The trick is to empower our kids to navigate the two. And since they learn this in that menacing, hazardous and jeopardous place called home (“There’s no place like home!” insists Dorothy, desperate to get out of Oz—wait, didn’t a tornado just HIT home?). So again, parents must perform a balancing act—on the one hand, being vigilant about danger, anticipating it and rescuing children from its clutches while on the other allowing their kids the scrapes, lacerations, bruises and sprains that come with activity. Parents, working with the guardian angel platoons, do this balancing act daily—only getting respite when their kids are safely in bed (unless they fall onto a pile of Lego, that is).

So yes , raising boys is a dangerous business. Indeed, raising children in general is not for the faint of heart. It’s the most important job out there, and often there is little support for it: emotional, economic, social. If it really is as important as everyone seems to think, then it stands to reason that there should be some serious pay-rate increases, for the parents AND for all those guardian angels (although I’m not sure what they would get paid in). Maybe parents need to start a union. The International Brother and Sisterhood of Parental Units Everywhere—IBSPUE! Parents of the world, unite! You have only your guilt to lose! Strike for higher wages! DANGER pay! Oh, yes indeed.

Wouldn’t it be nice…