Two nights ago, as I watched The Pitt on HBO, there was an episode that involved a dad bringing his son into the ER because he had stuck two beads up his nose.
I watched in mild amusement.
I’d never had to deal with that kind of thing with my own girls, but I did remember my only brother not only doing that with chunks of ground beef, but also with a piece of a crayon.
He did it not once, but twice.
I have always used this fact in my own inventory for why I’m the more intelligent of the two siblings.
As I watched the show, as if being given a premonition, I paid extra attention, somehow knowing it may be useful.
I had no idea I would need that information so quickly.
The very next day, before her nap time, my oldest daughter, Alena, came carrying my two year old granddaughter, Mavis, from their house which is right next door.
Alena is pregnant with our second grandchild now, and her face looked even more exhausted than usual.
“Can you help me?” She asked.
I could tell it was something big, just by the way she asked it.
“She shoved a raisin in her nose, and I can’t get it out.”
I couldn’t believe it: A real-life The Pitt application!
I knew just what to do! I had this!
Plug the opposite nostril, then blow forcefully into the mouth with a burst like you’re giving CPR. Watch me strap on my cape! Watch that raisin be quickly conquered!
Only, after several such bursts and seeing the raisin peek out, then suck back in, after a nasal rinse, and a bulb syringe suction to no avail, we started scrambling to grab our things and take her to the local urgent care to see if they could get it.
Urgent Care is a funny name for a place with only three employees, two of whom seem like they still might need help with cutlery. Our town is a small hippie town. The doctor’s name is literally “Dr. Flower.” There is nothing urgent about a hippie doctor. She even types with one finger.
The check in and wait took so long I pictured the raisin petrifying.
Mavis hung upside down, and demanded books. Alena and I sighed and gave up waiting.
At one point I took control of the scope and tried my own hand at looking while Alena pinned her, and after over an hour, I wandered into the hall, where the two at the desk looked surprised to see me, and I came to the conclusion they had actually forgotten we were even in there.
Finally, after another 20 minutes, the doctor appeared to immediately ask if we were sure there was even a raisin. After two hours of waiting is not the time to make a woman feel doubted.
I wondered then who exactly would spend nearly two hours in urgent care with a toddler unless they were certain.
“Yes. First, she told us she did it, then we saw it.
Before we came, we spent at least 15 minutes trying to get it while it poked in and out like a nervous groundhog.”
This is the point where four women attempted to hold a two-year-old still while looking in her nose with a lighted scope, and Alena made a face that told me she was questioning the fact that she had, once again, gotten pregnant.
If you have never tried to pin a toddler down who doesn’t want to be pinned, I will tell you:
You could have the strength of Hercules, and you will still somehow end up losing.
Nothing on this earth is stronger than a toddler who doesn’t want something you are giving.
The fact that I have done this sometimes gives me false confidence when I read news reports out of Florida that “I could have definitely wrestled that Yorkie from that gator.”
After a few seconds of us pinning, and Mavis calling out that she didn’t want it, and all she wanted was Elmo, the doctor shrugged and told us that she wasn’t sure there was a raisin at all, because she saw nothing.
This shrugging made me rather upset, after seeing it for sure, and the hours of waiting,
so we requested that she call an ENT to see if anyone was available to look more deeply.
She went away, and returned, only to tell us that none could. We would just have to wait
and monitor by sniffing.
She said that if one was really stuck, soon Mavis’ nose would start smelling;
That one way we could know for sure, was to do a sniff test daily.
I could tell from my pregnant daughter’s face, this would be a task that would fall to me.
Pregancy and sniffing the nasal cavity of a toddler do not mix well.
When you live next door, that job goes automatically to Grammy.
We were released without being charged at all, because, well, they had done nothing.
We came home tired, with our shoulders slumped, and Alena took Mavis back to their house, no better off than when we had left it.
I opened my front door and just stood in the doorway, hoping my body language would mostly tell the story.
My husband, Justin, sat up from where he had layed on the couch the entire time we were gone, and said, “How did it go?” He had bed-head.
I had just finished my long rant, telling him the entire story, when he casually turned his head to the left, squinted, and said,
“Wait. What’s that?”
His finger pointed.
The words still echo.
I think you know what it was.
I turned and looked to see THE RAISIN.
It was just sitting on the ground by the recliner where I’d first done my The Pitt doctor impression.
It must have flown out when we didn’t see, and gotten missed in all the chaos.
He had laid there with his head mere feet away from it the whole time we’d been at Urgent Care looking for it.
I didn’t say another word,
I simply picked it up and carried it over to Alena’s. I threw the door open, and held it up to her, victorious.
She didn’t say a word back, at first.
She just took a slow, defeated bite of a sandwich.
Our shared looks said, “Of course.
Of course it was here all along.
Of course that was the one time a man ever looked and found something.”
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
