Whats UP down South

My husband was telling me today about our son's efforts to patch up a bridge that he has across a ditch in his driveway. I just shook my head when he mentioned that he'd bruised his hand and torn off a nail while doing the repairs. It brought back recollections of many trips to the doctor and to the emergency room with this child.

He was never sick which was a good thing. He has allergies to penicillin and a couple of the other antibiotics they give in the place of. We found out about the allergies when he was 17 months old. A neighbor had left some gas in a cola bottle on his porch and my son grabbed it and took a great gulp of it. That was our first trip to emergency. The doc pumped his stomach as 2 nurses and I held him bound in a straightjacket so that they could do this. I think I was crying harder than he was during all of this. After x-rays to see if he would develop chemical pneumonia and a night in an oxygen tent, he was released the next day with the antibiotics. Twelve hours later we were back to spend 5 days in there from the reaction to the antibiotics.

When he was about 8, for 3 of the next 4 summers, the same week in June each time, we were in the emergency room again. The first incident was a broken wrist from a fall he took while riding up and down on the roll-up doors at the farm shop.( Mind you, he told me he fell off of his bike!)

The next summer was the year of the pellet gun which was not loaded. The neighbor's little boy shot him in the leg with his own gun. They both ran screaming in to the house, "It was an accident, It was an accident", to a panicky mom wondering WHAT was an accident! Another trip to the emergency, where they did minor surgery to remove the phantom pellet from his calf.

We skipped the next summer and then when he was 10, he found a frog in the ditch in front of the house and in his attempt to catch the frog, he got a snake bite. Twelve hours later, after being on a heart monitor, and and under close watch, they decided that he didn't receive but a tiny bit of the venom so we were homefree again. That trip was pretty frightening though, especially when they had to call the poison control center to get instructions on how to treat a snakebite.

We made several trips after that for football injuries and other boy related injuries. I think back now and wonder how in the hell I got through it all without losing my mind!