Chapter Nine: The Emergency Room-again

“Jesus, our Savior, was the epitome of kindness and compassion. He healed the sick. He spent much of His time ministering to the one or many. He spoke compassionately to the Samaritan woman who was looked down upon by many. He instructed His disciples to allow the little children to come unto Him. He was kind to all who had sinned, condemning only the sin, not the sinner. He kindly allowed thousands of Nephites to come forward and feel the nail prints in His hands and feet. Yet His greatest act of kindness was found in His atoning sacrifice, thus freeing all from the effects of death, and all from the effects of sin, on conditions of repentance.”
-Joseph B. Wirthlin

This one’s a bit embarrassing to my sweet Nathan, but don’t worry about it affecting our marital bliss. He never reads anything I write. A man who is too busy to look at my novels certainly won’t be looking at a manuscript of “mommie” stories. Besides, it’s just too good not to tell.

It happened just as some friends we had over for dinner were heading out the door. Sean ran over to his daddy with his arms stretched up. Nathan grabbed him by the wrists and swung him up to catch him under his arms and throw him into the air. This was a game they’d played a hundred times before.

This time, however, Sean cried out just as Nate caught him. I hurried over to see if he was okay. We both forgot about the friends, who wished a fervent hope that it all turned out okay and left. Sean looked fine. He was clutching one arm to his body, though and whimpering. I said that it was probably going to be okay, but Nate interrupted with, “No. Amy, I heard it pop.”

Since neither of us had any expertise in the area and Sean wasn’t willing to even let us look at it, we decided not to wait. Something was obviously hurting him, even if we couldn’t see it. We squabbled for a minute about who was going to take him to the emergency room. (It was the only thing open.) Fortunately, for me, I was holding the trump card. I was the only one who could nurse Chloe. Besides, I pointed out, Nate was the one that caused it. That earned me a well-deserved dirty look.

In the couple of years we’d been there, we’d discovered that there was an emergency room only a few blocks from our house. It was certainly nothing like the beautiful hospital I went to when Ryan had croup, but this was a small thing. He would probably be in and out. Right! Nate headed off to the emergency room with my little boy.

I waited for hours for any news. Nate called me once from the hospital. They had seen the triage nurse. She had said it was no big deal, but they would do some precautionary x-rays. After the x-rays, they were told to sit and wait to see the doctor. They had been waiting for three hours. He hoped to be able to come home soon.

I had already put the other children to bed. I tried to wait longer, and fell asleep on the couch. An hour later, Nate walked in, holding a sleeping Sean in his arms. He hadn’t seen the doctor. Patients had come in a steady stream, tying up the resources of the ER. But that wasn’t the only reason he left. For the last hour he had been alone. Not even the triage nurse came around. There were no other patients. He decided that they had the x-rays and would call if anything was really wrong.

I expressed a little concern, but Nate said, “The nurse said it’s called ‘nursemaid’s elbow.’ It’s probably like a sprain or tennis elbow. You can look it up.” With an exhausted sigh, he walked up the stairs to the bedrooms and put little Sean in his bed before collapsing into ours. I looked regretfully at the computer. The power had been out for over an hour. I couldn’t look it up. Besides, Nate was probably right.

I awoke after only sleeping a few minutes. I could hear rustling and whining coming from the boys’ room. I walked in and touched Sean’s head. He whimpered and was still holding that arm tightly against his little body. I laid down beside him in that twin bed. Whenever he started to wake up, I whispered that mommy was there and he fell back asleep.

That is why I found myself up before everyone else. The first thing I did was call the hospital and explain the situation to them. I asked what the x-rays showed. They informed me, very curtly, that they would not release that information to a parent. If I wanted the results, I would have to have a doctor call them. Well, I was fresh out of doctors. The pediatrician that treats my boys wasn’t open yet.

I remembered what Nate had told me the night before and googled “nursemaid’s elbow.” It was a horrible moment for me. The websites explained that it was a dislocation of the elbow. No wonder poor Sean hadn’t been able to sleep. None of the sites I could find explained how to fix it, so I started looking for medical sites written for doctors. I searched online pediatrics textbooks. I figured Nate could work his way through the lingo.

I found one that seemed rather promising and ran up stairs. Nate was sleeping, but I put and end to that. I patted his back and said, “The internet said Nursemaid’s elbow is a dislocation. It won’t go away on its own.”

Nate blinked once and responded, “Well don’t I feel like and idiot.”

I pulled him downstairs and set him in front of the website I’d found. Within a few minutes he had his hand out in front of him and was muttering something while twisting it around. I went back upstairs and got Sean. He still didn’t want anyone to touch his arm.

Nate tried a few things while Sean cried and I had a sudden memory. It had been a year ago at a ward sponsored play group. A friend of mine was pulling on her sons arm telling him it was time to go. The son recoiled and started to cry. My friend freaked out, saying she’d heard the arm pop. Why hadn’t I remembered before? That was the same thing Nate had said. Another lady had walked over to the little catastrophe, taken the boys arm and twisted it. The boy immediately began acting normal. She told us it used to happen to one of her kids all the time and the doctor showed her how to fix it.

I ran for the ward directory and called Sister Clements. I asked her if I could bring Sean over and she told me that I could, but she thought she could tell me how to fix it over the phone. I handed the phone to Nate. He muttered, “Uh-huh. Okay. Right. Thanks a lot.” Then he hung up and said to me, “She said to do the same thing the website said. It’s not working.”

I was a little frustrated, but I hadn’t burned all my bridges. The doctor’s office was open now. I called the doctor. The receptionist told me there were no appointments available, but she could schedule me in a couple days. I begged her, telling her that I was certain this was something the doctor could fix in a matter of seconds. She told me I could talk to the doctor. I told him the problem and he said, “Okay, here’s what you do…” I handed the phone to Nate.
Again, I listened to “Uh-huh. Okay. Right. Thanks a lot.” Then he hung up and told me the doctor had told him the same thing as Sister Clements and the internet.

I growled in frustration and almost screamed, “Then why didn’t you tell him ‘that’s not working, can we bring him in to you.’”

Poor little Sean was cowering on the couch, clutching his injured arm. He obviously wasn’t letting Daddy near it. I walked over to him, grabbed his arm and twisted it a little more violently than I’d seen Nate do. Almost indistinguishably, it popped.

Nate walked over and said, “Let’s try again.” I pushed him away and told him I thought it might have popped that time. He looked skeptical. Sean, on the other hand, had stopped whimpering. The websites told that it might take a day or more for the child to begin using their hand. Within ten minutes, Sean was eating yogurt with it.

The really fun part of the story came about an hour later. I heard Nate on the phone with one of his medical school buddies. He was telling him how inefficient the emergency room was and how he got tired of waiting there. Then he said, “So I left and came home to look it up on the internet. I fixed it myself. It was really easy.”

My first reaction was to call my sister and tell her the whole hilarious story. But a little later, when Nate had moved on to something else, I walked over to him and said in my best deep, cool-guy voice, “I fixed it myself. It was really easy.”

My poor husband turned bright red and stuttered, “I’ll tell him you did it.” I just laughed and laughed. I love that man!

A week after that fun experience, Nate was playing on the computer while I was chopping vegetables for dinner. Chloe was playing on the floor in the living room. She started crying, so I abandoned my chopping to find out what was wrong with my baby.

As fate would have it, there was absolutely nothing wrong with Chloe. But, by the time I discovered that, I heard a screaming coming from the kitchen. I ran to the kitchen and found Sean standing on a step stool he had dragged over to the cupboard where I had been working. He was clutching his hand and dripping blood everywhere.

I yelled for Nate and started to examine my little boy’s hand. He had decided that chopping vegetables looked like a lot of fun and given it a try. Unfortunately, he’d managed to slit his finger tip. Nate only looked at it for a minute before declaring that it needed stitches. With a sigh, he added, “It’s your turn.”

I wrapped the finger with bandage to keep the bleeding at a minimum and then put a sock over the whole hand so Sean wouldn’t be tempted to remove the bandage. Then I packed my sweet, impetuous Sean into his car seat and headed for the same Emergency room he’d been to a week earlier.

I’m not the type of ideal wife that always has dinner on the table at five-thirty. My family is happy to eat around seven. This being the case, it was already getting dark when I pulled into the parking lot at the emergency room.

Unlike when Nate had taken Sean in, the waiting room was full of people. There was no one at the front desk, so I signed the paper and took a seat. It would be a little over two hours before anyone would bother to ask why we had driven to the scenic emergency room that fun, fun night.

I spotted a number of ironies right away. They had baskets full of magazines. I picked one up and started flipping through it. The title was something along the lines of, “Costal Living.” It featured stories about extravagant homes and where to get the best imported food. It was interesting considering the current social group in the ER waiting room.

I had read a news article only days before about the abysmal state of emergency medicine in the United States. The article pointed out that the system was overloaded with the poor and those without insurance using it as primary care. At the time, I laughed, because I knew a student couple in the same situation as me that took their little boy to the ER for ear infections because they hated the state health clinics. Looking around that overcrowded waiting room, it didn’t seem so funny.

I’m not making a statement about people being irresponsible and making it so that those with real emergencies can’t get care. I’m not speaking to a need for change in the current health care system. I’m not even pointing out how my heart aches to see people in such states of despair. If I’ve learned anything while raising my children and facing the various challenges, it’s that I don’t know enough about any given subject to be judgmental. The world is far more complicated than the most effective campaign ad would have us believe. I’m simply describing the scene and the impressions that were laid before me that night.

Across from where I struggled with trying to keep Sean near me, I noticed a young woman there with who must have been her mother. She smiled briefly when our eyes met. I made a friendly comment and was met with a familiar half-smile. It was familiar only since I had moved to Chicago. It meant, “I want to be gracious, but I have absolutely no idea what you’re saying.”
I recall telling my family that I was going to learn Spanish because I was sick of standing in grocery lines and being unable to engage in simple small talk. It was that way in the waiting room at the doctor’s office as well. It was that way in many of the places that I was used to a bit of noncommittal, small talk. I could see the “you sure have your hands full,” in this lady’s eyes. But, I was unable to laugh and tell her that she had no idea how right she was.

The kind looks of the lady were unique in that waiting room. I spent the next few hours making Sean keep his hand covered, running after him as he terrorized the other patients and trying to keep him distracted with toys and crayons that I kept in my backpack for church. Usually I would have had a variety of reactions. There would have been smiles from some people because they understood what I was going through. There would have been pitying looks from others. Some people would have glared at me with that “can’t you control your child?” gaze that I dreaded so much. I was shocked by the complete lack of interest. Everyone seemed to be consumed by their own thoughts or else cripplingly depressed.

Sean’s jovial attitude started to change as well. It hit me that my little boy hadn’t eaten. On one side of the waiting room, behind the wall that led to the bathrooms, there were a couple of vending machines. I glanced at them on my way out of the bathroom after changing Sean’s diaper. I walked over to my backpack and looked through the pockets, but I didn’t have any money. I hadn’t exactly thought about packing a bag as I ran out the door at home.

I sat down again, holding my whining son and attempting to distract him by driving a toy car along the floor. The next moment the lady who had been sitting across from us left. She came back with a bag of cheetoes, which she held out to Sean and said, “Here baby.” I’m pretty sure that exhausted her English abilities, but I tried to thank her anyway. She just smiled that blank smile and sat back down with her mom.

The whining stopped immediately and Sean was quickly seated on my lap, devouring the cheetoes. I don’t know how she knew what he needed. But it was strange to me, in light of social protocol. Many women would not let a stranger give their child something. I wouldn’t think to give someone else’s child something like that without first asking. If I couldn’t ask, I would probably have assumed that it would be more polite just to keep to myself. The bottom line was that there was someone in that room full of people preoccupied with their own suffering that was trying to help someone else. I was ashamed it wasn’t me. Again, I had to be a grateful receiver.

Shortly after that, we were called to the admitting desk to talk to the receptionist. She asked what was wrong and then asked to see the finger. I removed the sock and the bandages. The receptionist handed me some forms to sign and took Sean’s hand to look at his cut. By the time I looked up from the forms, Sean had his hurt hand stuck into the bag of cheetoes and was starting to whine from the sting. Then, I got the “can’t you control your child” look from the receptionist. Oh how I’d missed it!

I ran off to the bathroom to wash Sean’s orange stained hand and re-bandage it. When we emerged, the lady who had given us the cheetoes was gone. And the nurse was finally ready to see my little boy. She took his weight, temperature and blood pressure. She examined the finger and declared that it did, indeed, require stitches. We saw a very nice nurse practitioner an hour later. Sean got two stitches and an “incredibles” bandage. Naturally, the stitches became infected. You shouldn’t treat cuts with cheetoes powder. But that’s a whole different story.

A few months after our trips to the emergency room, I read a news article about a woman who had come into the same ER with chest pains. She had been told to have a seat and died while waiting. The coroner’s office declared it a homicide, putting the ER a few blocks from where we lived into the National news. I just shook my head, remembering how I’d told friends and family after our ER experiences that I was glad Sean’s injury wasn’t something more serious because he would have bled to death before anyone asked me what was wrong. Of course, it was just a shock comment to take their attention away from the obvious question of, “How did Sean get a knife?” I got so sick and tired of people asking me that that I started replying, “I gave it to him and told him to go play in the street.”