The kids wanted to go outside and play after dinner. Sunset wasn't too far away, but I gave them half an hour to go out and run off some energy. Summer was waning, and I could feel winter beginning to stalk us from the shadows. Long Illinois months full of kids stuck inside like marbles rolling around in a box.
"Go," I told them. "In half an hour you come in for baths and bed."
When they ran out, I sat back and found myself in the company of an old acquaintance, Silence. He's been dropping by more and more often lately, though I hadn't seen him for years before now. With my husband working second shift and the kids finally old enough to play outside without my constant vigilance, Silence and I have been rediscovering each other. Our visits are tragically brief.
When I heard the front door open, I took a deep breath to relay the ten-minute warning to the child coming in the door. Before I could get the words out, my middle son jumped in with his "I'm telling" voice.
"Mom," he complained. "Mark hit me in the head with a Nerf gun and now I'm bleeding."
Then he turned around, sending droplets of blood flinging off the back of his head. They splattered audibly across the floor, lending a dramatic soundtrack to the Jackson Pollock-esque design streaked all over his back.
Wow, I thought.
They are not kidding when they talk about how head wounds bleed. "Ok," I said, calmly, for I am a mother of three boys, and I am not easily freaked. "Sit down, right where you are." I was slightly afraid that he might faint, though he is the least likely of my sons to do so. This is my tough guy. Note that he did not come in screaming and crying. His voice and expression betrayed no warning of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre scenery left in his wake. Like his father, pain does not slow this child down. It makes him mad. It was just that around the edges of the red flush of anger on his face, he looked a little paler than usual. We are extremely fair-skinned people, so the only way to tell that we've turned pale is when our rosy glow is exchanged for a flat white pall with a startling undertone of blue.
As I fetched a washcloth to press against the wound, I whipped out my cell phone and began making calls. My mother-in-law, the nurse, to come give me a second opinion on whether stitches were required. My husband, to let him know that an ER trip might be on the evening's agenda. My neighbor, to receive the other children, since the ER rarely appreciates a Brady-bunch style parade no matter how adorable and *ahem* well-behaved the children are. After all, one of these children just injured the other, and they might get the impression that my children aren't perfect. *gasp*
When my mother-in-law arrived, she looked at his head and said it would probably be a good idea to get it looked at, cleaned out, and maybe a stitch or two. Perhaps she was fooled for a moment by my son's nonchalant attitude. She may have been taken in by his convincing act that led one to believe he was more concerned with having been so unfairly attacked by his younger sibling. When he reacted by burying his head in her lap and crying, she responded like any good grandma. She hedged.
"Well," she said, "maybe we could just Dermabond it. We can just scrub it out and Dermabond it. That's all they would do at the ER, really."
I spent three seconds imagining myself holding this child down while I "scrubbed it out" and said, "No, we'll just go. Get in the car, bud."
"No," my son raged, as though I'd suggested outlawing puppies at Christmas. "Why can't we just let it bleed?"
This logic would make perfect sense to his father, his grandfather, and John Wayne, who shaped so much of their definition on Manhood. Grandma was not a fan of this plan. She pointed out that it was full of germs, it could get infected, and really, they probably wouldn't actually put a stitch in. She was almost sure they would just glue it.
Seeing that her best attempts at persuasion were not working and were in real danger of disintegrating into pleading, I took him by the arm and said, "Let's go. In the van. Now."
He grumbled at high volume all the way to the van, and Grandma followed behind, still trying to convince him that this would be fine. Really, not bad at all. My heart fluttered when I realized she saw his dad in him, too, and probably just wanted to hug him but knew it wouldn't fly when he was in full "Tough Guy" mode. She even called him by his dad's name when she helped him into the van, which endeared her to me all the more.
In the ER, he slumped in the seat at Patient Check-In and gave the receptionist the full force of his sullenness. No, he did not want a stuffed animal, and his voice implied that he was insulted that she'd asked. No, he did not want a coloring book, either. Each time one of the medical staff asked him what happened, I cringed.
"My brother hit me in the head with a gun," he'd say, his stern voice and body language communicating clearly what a great injustice this whole process was. These medical staff, all women, never batted an eye. They all gave him knowing looks and sympathetic comments about "brothers." The scourge of the nation, those pesky creatures.
My husband arrived, dressed for work in full uniform. He was on-shift for our Sheriff's Department, but was able to come by the ER to be with us. Astonishingly, once my husband showed up and began ribbing my son about the treatment he was receiving, his hard shell began to crack and he slowly started laughing at his father's jokes.
"We didn't have those wussy sponges when I was kid," my husband told him. "They used these brushes with hard plastic bristles and dug 'em in there like they were trying to open the wound. And this nasty brown stuff that smelled bad and stained your skin for days."
Must be a guy thing. This would have earned nothing but eye-rolling from me, but it amused my son and did the trick.
When the doctor came in, he saw my husband standing there in full police gear and hesitated. He was an international, and it appeared to me that he was trying to make sense of the scene before him based on his knowledge of the usual ER scene. A police officer standing next to the bed of an injured child is probably almost always a bad sign. However, we were all smiling and the tone was clearly light by this point, which is probably what gave him pause.
"What happened," he asked my son, donning latex gloves. I tensed, knowing what was coming next.
"My brother hit me in the head with a gun."
"Who hit you with what??" the doctor asked, incredulously.
"A toy gun. It was a toy. A Nerf gun. They were playing. It was an accident," my husband and I rushed in, talking over one another while trying to explain.
"Oh," the doctor said, nodding. Now he understood. Sigh of relief from both parents.
In the end, the doctor elected to use neither stitches nor Dermabond, but staples. To my ears, my son's conviction that their treatment choice would be based on what would cause the most pain possible had just been proven true. For my son, however, "staple" was an unfamiliar word in this context and it didn't sound that bad to him.
"Ok," he said, shrugging. "Let's get this over with." It helped that he clutched four dollars in one fist, a gift (bribe) Dad have given him to buy ice cream once the drama was over.
The sound those staples made going into his head, and the look on his face when they did, had me convinced that I would be a blubbering mess were I the one on the gurney. My son, however, was fully back in control of himself and he bore it with a slight wince and an action-hero-style whispered
ow. No tears, no whining, no lashing out and wrenching the torture device from the doctor's hands. John Wayne would be so pround.
In the end, the treatment that worked the best was good, old-fashioned dad-time. But a medium Thin Mint blizzard with extra Thin Mint and a shot of chocolate helped the medicine go down, too.
