This weekend our family is in Watch & Wait mode, as we try to determine the course of action for my autistic son who swallowed a 3.5 cm / 1.5 oz. hematite stone shaped like a heart. This is not our first time in a state of suspended medical animation with Jordan. On January 10th this year he woke up and announced that he was sorry that he ate “all the candy”. All the candy turned out to actually be 53 magnets and a screw. I can only presume that the screw was dessert or maybe just something picked up by the ten magnets that made their way out as nature intended. Not that Mother Nature really planned for kids to ever eat magnets.
Our adventures in January led to a three-day hospital stay and a three-hour endoscopic procedure that the surgical nurse likened to “watching the doctors play Nintendo!” as they removed 43 red, yellow, blue and green Magnetix pieces from my son’s stomach. Happy to entertain, that’s our motto.
MSNBC recently posted an article that listed the 15 things kids can consume and rated them from innocuous: item #1 Dirt — don’t worry (it’ll all work out in the end), to fatal: item #15 — Poison. Item number 14 — magnets. Multiple medical sources stated that swallowing one magnet is bad, two is dangerous and three or more is potentially fatal. If you’ve set your scorecard down, let me remind you again: 53 magnets. And a screw.
We thought that Jordan had learned his big, fat, expensive 70/30% insurance coverage lesson about not eating anything that wasn’t food. But, he claims this latest gastronomical experimentation was an accident. The smooth, polished rock was in his mouth and unexpectedly swallowed before he realized it. Three x-rays and close to 48 hours later, all we can do is sit and wait.
What is it with kids and putting things where they don’t belong anyway? [Not putting things where they DO belong is another subject for another time.] It’s not just the non-food items either. I once received an earsplitting phone call from a woman who was racing her son to the emergency room because he'd just shoved a handful of M&Ms up his nose. As she hyperventilated into my ear, I calmly asked if they were plain or peanut. Silence was my answer and then she snapped, “Why would you ask such a stupid question at a time like this?!” I replied that while M&Ms won’t melt in you hand, they most certainly will in your nose. I then asked her to have her son hold his nose with his hot little hands. Within seconds, he managed to blow his nose and those M&Ms came a-tumbling down. Visit to the hospital = -$1,500. Box of tissue and M&Ms = $4.50. Getting to tell this story to you = priceless.
It is my sincere wish that I will be telling a tale with an equally happy ending once this whole rock episode is over. Until then, please keep your fingers crossed and your hands folded that this is the last time I’ll get to tell such a story from under my own roof. That or I’m going to have to legally change our name from Katz to Goatz.