A Peawhistle By Any Other Name

Two kids napping at the same time and another off at school? The crap you say! This doesn't happen often as I've discovered over the past month, hence why I made a mad dash to do as many important things as I possibly could squeeze in, namely checking my email and blogging. You know, life-and-death sorta stuff.

Speaking of life and death, guess what Peawhistle did to me last week? SCARED THE POPSICLES OUT OF ME, THAT'S WHAT. So we're in the parking lot of the grocery store and I'm unloading my many, many children to go shopping. I have Peanut in the cart seat and PW is standing next to him while I get SweetPea in the sling. My back was turned to the older two while I was extracting SP and I hear a sick-sounding thwack. I turn around to see PW on the asphalt, flat on her back, head in a puddle of water. My first thought was that she was screwing around as usual and I told her to get up. She lifted her head and let it fall back on the ground in the puddle and she stopped moving. I went to help pull her up and she was completely limp and her eyes went cross-eyed and then started to move in circles. She didn't say a word or make a sound as I started screaming her name to wake up, all while trying to pick her up unsuccessfully. After a while she came around enough so that she wasn't steady, but she wasn't limp anymore, and as I asked her if she was OK she started to freak out and demanded to know why I sounded "weird"(-er than normal). That's when I threw everyone back in the car and sped over to the pediatrician's office. The triage nurse came out and sat with PW while the receptionist called the ambulance. My dear friend Ethel willingly dropped everything (she was in the middle of making dinner by the way) to race over and take Peanut and SweetPea to my house along with her own daughter, Pippy Longstocking. Fortunately, Pippy and Peanut are very close in age and get along very well, or as well as two nearly 2-year-olds can get along. Pippy is Peanut's only friend, which made his evening a little more fun anyway, even if Ethel's (and Fred's by association) evening was all shot to heck as a result of the events. She graciously stayed and entertained my children until The Husband could get home from work and take her and Pippy back home to a very, very late dinner. I will forever be in debt to Ethel and the entire Mertz family for that.

The ambulance strapped PW all up, loaded her in, and we shot off out of there with lights and sirens blazing. They had called around to various ERs and the Children's Center at the main Hopkins hospital had said they were intensely interested in seeing her (and you recall my thoughts on medical professionals being intensely interested in my children). So we flew down to Baltimore in rushhour traffic. The sirens made the stop-and-go traffic not so bad as most people are still good about getting out of the way for an ambulance, even when there seems to be no place for them to really go. However, one or two motorists blew my mind a bit. Here's the ambulance, flying down the highway at 75 mph with lights and sirens and the whole deal, and there were still people who thought it was going too slow and actually cut us off. I'm no cop as we all know, but isn't that illegal or something? And extremely unethical? And supremely jerky? Yeah, well I'll see you in HELL you jerks. Man alive.

So we get to the ER and they rush her off to the trauma unit as a "Bravo," whatever that means (sounds important though!), but they wouldn't let me follow her. Why, because I'm going to start accidentally doing surgery on her or something? I wasn't screaming and freaking out, but I would sure like to see where the crap they're taking my child. Eventually a social worker came and escorted me around the long way to her room, which looked more like an operating room to me (comforting!), and let me stand by the doorway while several people hovered over her. I also had to sign release forms because they were video taping the whole thing, presumably for teaching purposes, or just kicks and giggles later on. Either one.

She had a CT scan on her head and neck to look for internal bleeding or cracks, none of which were found fortunately. And then came the question of why the kid fell in the first place. She kept telling everyone she just closed her eyes, fell asleep, and that's the last thing she remembered. I didn't see anything seizure-like when I saw her on the ground, and nothing else in her recent history would explain why she would just pass out like that. So that is still a mystery to some extent. We're all hoping and assuming she was just playing on the cart, slipped off, hit her head and then passed out, but we can't be positive as I wasn't watching. But they did an EKG on her heart just to rule out any heart defects or issues that would have caused her to lose consciousness.

They considered keeping her overnight until the final results of the CT scan came back, but given that the preliminary results looked fine and she was back to her old self, PeaWhistle-esque Personality in tact, they released her with Hannah Montana stickers and sent her home. I tell you, I fell in love with PW all over again. And not just because I thought I was going to lose her, but I realized just how much I take the little thing for granted. Within 10 minutes of her being admitted to the ER she had the entire trauma staff in her room cracking up laughing at everything she said. She is an absolute riot, no doubt. Combine that with her adorable little singsong voice and you have quite the crowd-pleaser (who knows when she's captured an audience's attention and hams it up to the Nth degree). They asked me if she's like this all the time, and that's when I realized how lucky I am to have such a fantastic kid. I'm used to her funny conversations and cute little voice, and really, really bad jokes that make you laugh anyway, so I don't always think of her as something special. She's just Peawhistle, you know? But she is unique and special and I'm so glad that she came out of this with just a concussion and nothing worse. And I'm so glad she's mine. I love you Peawhistle!

AND SO HELP ME IF YOU EVER SCARE ME LIKE THAT AGAIN I WILL TOTALLY KILL YOU. Love you, Sweetheart!