What’s the weirdest thing you’ve eaten? There was a French man who ate an entire airplane over two years. Number Two chose a faster and more modest diet: plastic fork. At school, hankering for his mac and cheese to be heated up, he chewed on his fork like an anxious horse at the bit, and snapped a fork tine off in his mouth. Teacher was notified, removal was attempted, back was thumped, and the fork tine went down the hatch. Which is how I found myself leaving work at noon on a Monday and going to the emergency room.
Twenty minutes later I was pushing my stalled car through a parking garage. I’ve been (my car has been having) overheating problems to the point where it will now cut off if I slow under ten miles an hour for more than ten seconds, requiring me to take constant right-hand turns and keep moving like a shark. I pushed it in front of a doctor’s entrance, told the parking attendant I’d be back in fifteen minutes, and went into the emergency room and found my wife and Number Two sitting. And waiting. He looked fine, no pain, my wife looked worried and unhappy about waiting. Which is what I did for a half hour before security called demanding, “You need to move your car immediately sir.”
“Hi fellas!” I said in a dangerously loud and chipper voice when I strode back to the garage. “It won’t restart until it cools down so…”
“You can’t park your car here, sir,” said the guard in an Authoritative Tone. Even his goatee was officious. They would have no solution but to push it uphill and out of the garage.
“Dig in fellas,” I said. I offered to steer while they pushed. Hell, if they wanted a doctor’s parking spot cleared that bad enough they could break a sweat. No less than four cars pulled up within a foot of my bumper as it was being pushed backwards, with the blinkers on, up the parking garage entrance ramp. What more indication do you need, people?
Back in the emergency room Number Two and my wife waited and watched daytime TV. I returned with a sweat rose blossoming in the center of my shirt and took a glance around the room. This is what emergency room waiting rooms are now: places for people with non-emergencies to get free health care, charge their phones, watch booty videos on their phones, and come down off their highs. Am I being unfair? No. One girl came in wearing knee-high boots and walking normally, claiming she “might have sprained it.” What, her frontal cortex? She must’ve missed the “emergency” part of “Emergency Room.” After two hours Number Two got an x-ray, then we returned to the waiting room. After another two hours my wife left to go pick up CH at school. Then a nurse came out and told everyone there would be a 5-7 hour wait. Here follows a short account:
Hour five: we are admitted to the back where we get to wait on a gurney instead of a chair. N2 charms every one of the female doctors and nurses, who are willing to do anything for him: take him outside to meet firemen, catch a cricket, provide apple juice and stickers. He’s a ladykiller, this one. Finally after two short consultations, phone calls to a GI specialist and then the GI specialist specialist, the boy is cleared. We’ll let the plastic pass through instead of having an endoscopy. He’s allowed to eat his mac and cheese which has remained in his lunchbox like treasure. He tears open the container and eats with both hands.
Let me say this boy was so patient and calm and brave and just happy despite waiting six hours with no food or water.
The next day I got to go panning for gold in the potty, verifying for myself that sifting through poop means you’ve hit rock bottom, but I found something right near the end, a small speck of white plastic. Carefully rinsed and washed and washed again, here is the fork tine reunited with its host after an 18-hour trip through my son’s intestines:
Let that be a lesson: don’t go to the emergency room in a car that’s prone to overheating!
Writer, architect, father, husband.