There Will Be Blood

I have two girls, one boy.

The biggest difference in raising them is probably trips to the emergency room.

Kidding, but not really.

One girl needed a trip to the ER when she was 2 (Grandpa accidentally dislocated her elbow while swinging her around by her wrists — don’t play that game). The other one never had an emergency situation, I don’t think, although I’m pretty sure she did get dropped once. The boy, though… Whew, the boy.

If you have a son, guaranteed, there will be blood. A lot of it.

I don’t know what it is about their DNA* but they’re just rougher and dumber about how they play and I dunno, I’m not a guy so I can’t say for sure, but it almost seems like there is some sort of unwritten bro code that you must completely fill up your ER punch card before you hit 18. I think we’re up to four or five visits for him, plus an emergency visit to the dentist after he sneezed — while his head was in the sink — and chipped a front tooth. There was the time No. 3 snorted a piece of corkscrew pasta up his nose, causing much panic in the house. He was in the waiting room when he sneezed it out, kindly saving us a $100 copay. He also broke a pinkie, ran into another kid with his face resulting in a possibly broken schnoz, snapped a toe and most recently, bit through his tongue.

It is every bit as gross as it sounds.

During a very spirited game of HORSE that involved three competitive kids and a pool basketball hoop, No. 3 felt like he had to pull out the stops to break the tie at H-O-R-S so he bolted up out of the water to dunk and then grab the ball before it splashed, which would have been a totally cool move, except that he smacked his chin on the metal rim and chomped his tongue hard enough to leave blood all over his friend’s pool deck. Sorry about that.

I hightailed it over to grab him and figure out what to do.

“I think he’s going to need stitches,” I told my husband as I checked in him for an urgent care visit.

“Noooooo,” he insisted. “You can’t stitch tongues. They heal on their own.”

Can I just point out that this was the same man who freaked out at the pasta-up-the-nose incident. “But it could get stuck up NEAR HIS BRAIN!” I remember him shouting, when I laughed at 2-year-old No. 3’s answer when I asked where his last bit of pasta was: “In… my…nose.”

And I would also like to point out that I am halfway to a medical degree because I was right again: Tongues can and do need to be stitched — just not at our closest urgent care. That was super fun to wait for an hour at NextCare on Pima, yeah, I’m calling them out because they deserve it, with everyone knowing exactly why we were there only to have the doctor tell us — and the chick at the front desk said the same as we were leaving — that they were not equipped to suture a tongue. Thanks for making my kid sit there in pain for no reason. Enjoy that $35 copay, you jerks.

So, off we went to the real emergency room, where three-quarters of Tucson was chilling on a late Sunday afternoon. I was so happy when they sent us down to the pediatric ER where there were considerably fewer miserable looking people.

Three dissolvable stitches and two hours later we were on our merry way. The cut’s healing quite nicely, thanks for asking, and, as a nice bonus, things are also going quite well on the GoFundMe campaign that one of No. 3’s friends jokingly started for his tongue.  

* deoxyribonumbskullic acid in this case