ER - Not the Series, but the Life Experience

So, Saturday night Mark and I spent some time at the Emergency Room with Fat Jack. I will just start off by saying that while this ER was extremely nice, there was no John Stamos or George Clooney in the bunch. I am pretty sure that medical dramas are ruining hospitals’ images because the world’s hottest men don’t really work there. No offense to Dr. S, our ER guy. He was moderately attractive, but no McSteamy, ok. He’d be more like McBuffy or something, because he had some muscles under that scrub shirt. In fact, he may be a pro wrestler on his off nights. But, I digress… this story isn’t really about our ER doc.

Jack had some sort of shaking incident on Saturday night. (This is not to be confused with Bentley’s shaky head incidents of the past caused by eating cat or goose poop. I am pretty sure Jack didn’t consume poop of any kind). I was holding Jack and suddenly his whole body started convulsing in these big violent movements. His eyelids parted and you could see his eyes had rolled back in his head. He wouldn’t hold his head up on his own and his tongue stuck out like it was too big for his mouth. It lasted about a minute, maybe a minute and a half, and then he was just as suddenly back asleep. Scared the crap out of me (figuratively, of course. Although, I did have to go number two before we went to the ER, so maybe it is literal).

All we know now is that they think that it was just a physical response to his sleep, like a nightmare or something. The doctor (McBuffy) said that a true seizure wouldn’t end like that, so we are in the clear (most likely). But, we are to go to the pediatrician tomorrow so they can determine if we need to run any tests.

But here is the moral of my story. I learned that nothing in the world is more frightening than having a child. I didn’t know that until then. It was my first trip to the ER with my baby. And when you are at the ER, it doesn’t matter if you’re with an infant or a 29 year old kid… it is still your baby. Jack (who is a baby anyway) was so small there. And he ain’t small. But the fears that run through your head… the what ifs… make him infinitely smaller and weaker than he was before the shaking started. While we sat there (a relatively short time in ER world), I wondered about the other people with their kids. Are they coming here for help, only to find out bad news? Were we? Was a normal day going to turn out to be the day we found out Jack had cancer, head trauma, disease, illness, insert every parent’s nightmare here. Is this the worst day of our lives? Or… is it for the parent in the next cubicle over? We were all total strangers unified in our panic over these little creatures that we choose to have, not knowing that the peaceful existence that we had carved out for ourselves is permanently over. Each parent in that hospital was interchangeable… each one praying silent prayers that they wouldn’t be the one that got the bad news that night.

In our case, we got the news we wanted. Nothing was wrong and we were the panicky parents that came to the ER for no reason. Thank you, God, I’ll take that title any day.