True stories of the ER

I'm so stoic, you know?  It's my thing.  I suffer in silence.

Or at least not super loud?

Like, a medium level?

This could be a very long story where I tell you that my ear has been bothering me for a few weeks, and that I went swimming and then I couldn't hear and then I got dizzier, and more nauseous and in more pain and was convinced I had an ear infection, and then more dizzy, and then more nauseous, until Chris and I found ourselves in the ER at 3:00 in the morning.  

But the important part of the story is this:

"Oh.  Looks like your ear is completely impacted with wax."

"So, you're telling me that I am in the ER in the middle of the night for ear wax?"

"Pretty much."

"You're saying I woke my hard-working brother in law in the middle of the night to come be with my sleeping children . . . for ear wax."

"Yes."

"I sought emergency help from highly trained trauma doctors for ear wax."

"Yes, but that is okay, because I wasn't doing anything else."

"Good.  Neither was I."

I'm going to need a body double. And my own house bus.

You guys!

Nobody told me that being a lazy blogger was costing me my chance to be rich and famous!

Did nobody see Sookie's comment on my last blog post?  Trying to recruit me to star in a television series?

Look, I write this thing.  I can't be expected to READ it, too.

. . .

Some further investigation reveals she might not be exactly offering stardom and a lucrative contract, as much as an invitation to the chance to apply to appear, for free, on a television show about weird pregnancies.

I beg your pardon.

I have never been anything but normal.  Or, if not normal, exactly, I have never been far enough outside of the range of normal to be of interest to anybody.

She wanted to hear about my experience with pica in pregnancy, which, I mean, did she not read my blog post about it?*

Because the blog post is pretty much it.  I wanted to eat laundry detergent.  A lot.  But I didn't.  The end. They couldn't even make a fifteen minute segment about that.

I am also quite sure I don't want to appear on TV.  I hear the camera adds ten pounds.  You know what else adds ten pounds?  Vacations.  And I've been on four of them this summer.



*Of course she has!  It's a front page Google search result for Pica + Pregnancy, holla!  See, I don't need Sookie and her suspiciously trendy name to bring me fame!

The Costco-Size Pack

Owen, when he was supposed to be sleeping tonight, came to the door of my bedroom, put his hands together in a prayer position and bowed.

Which is a little weird, right?  I was going to chalk it up to whatever TV show he's been watching recently, but then I thought about it and he's been almost exclusively watching Ninjago, which, as I understand it, is some kind of Lego world and Lego guys don't even have hands in the traditional sense, so now I don't know where he got that.

"Hi, Mom."

"Hi, Owen."

"When does school start?"

"In just a few weeks weeks, buddy."

"Is that a short time, or a long time?"

"I guess that is kind of relative.  It will probably feel pretty short."

"Short like the days are five minutes?"

"I don't know.  Probably not that short."

"But a day could never be five minutes, right?  Unless the sun died."

"I don't know what is going to happen when the sun dies."

"But the sun will die?"

See what he did there?  I've been bamboozled into admitting the sun is going to die and my guess is there will be a follow up conversation.

"Yes, scientists say the sun will die someday."

"And what will happen then?"

It is at this point that I have a decision to make.  In a flash, I see myself telling him about Life Exterminating Events or Existence Limiting Events or whatever they call it in disaster movies.  And he would go upstairs and talk about it with Sam.  Let's be honest - we're talking about Owen here.  He was devastated watching March of the Penguins (which, to be fair, is hella devastating).  Still, if he was that torn up about the death of the baby penguin, I don't think he's just going to take the end of the world, and, thus, the death of all baby penguins, particularly well.

I remember hearing the sun was going to blow up some day when I was a kid.  Scared the shit out of me. Kids have precisely three time-based reference points - no more, no less.  Yesterday (lasterday), Today, and Tomorrow.  They were born yesterday.  You were born yesterday.  Dinosaurs were born yesterday. Today is all the stuff that is happening right now.  Tomorrow is all the stuff that is going to happen.  Telling a kid that the world is going to explode in 5 billion years is exactly the same as telling them the world will explode tomorrow.

So, for this moment, I decided to bend my philosophy of not out-right lying to the children. Instead of saying, "The world will end and we will all die, but don't worry, that's not until tomorrow,"  I said, "We would have to stock up on light bulbs."

"Okay," he says.  "But I hope it isn't soon because we are on a spending freeze."