Nursery Jewel

As Mikey was being put down to sleep tonight, Ian came in and held out his fists. “Choose one,” he said. Mikey chose the right fist, and Ian opened it up to show a brilliant blue plastic gem. Our friends had given it to him a week ago, and Mikey loved to play with it. Sometimes it put it in his mouth a little, and we’d quickly tell him no, and he’d relent.

After lights out, Ian heard Mikey coughing, and when he came into his room, he found Mikey on the floor. “Mikey, where’s the blue diamond?”

Mikey pointed to his mouth and giggled.

“Ted!”

Ian and I tore the room apart, looking for evidence that Mikey hadn’t swallowed the two-inch diameter disc. While we did it, we kept grilling him, “Where is the diamond?” If you listened in, you’d imagine we were agents of a smuggling king pin, “Where is the diamond, Mikey?”

Mikey just pointed to his mouth and articulated it very plainly, “I put in my mouth, and I eated it.”

Of course, I rationalized that if the diamond had cleared his windpipe, he must be fine, but Ian pointed out that it wouldn't digest at all and would end up stuck in his small intestine and cause a blockage. We kept telling Mikey that this was serious, we were going to the doctor if he really swallowed the diamond, and he stuck to the story through laughter and tears. We knew the diamond had been in the room and couldn’t be anywhere else except inside him.

We live just a few blocks from the Valley’s only pediatric trauma center at Northridge Hospital so we brought him there.

They got us through in no time, though we shared the ER with some pretty sick folk and Mikey spent the whole time in a fabulous mood for a toddler at midnight. There were choruses of “Spiderman! Spiderman! Is he strong? Listen, bud, he got radioactive blood!”, there was practicing his rolls and somersaults (“You know, these floors are regularly splattered with blood and vomit,” a passing orderly let us know, in case we didn’t know), and there was telling the 12-month-old with the high fever weeping in his grandma’s arms, “Don’t cry, baby. Don’t be sad.”

I used my phone to check us into the hospital on Facebook, “Ted Peterson & Ian Smith are at Northridge Hospital Medical Center – Oh Mikey, did you really swallow that plastic diamond?” And the replies were predictable. “Don’t worry, Ted; it will come all right in the end” was one. “This too shall pass” was another.

The doctor was good, though there was a passing moment of weirdness. (“You’re both his dad? How that happen?”) The results of the xrays were inconclusive. He said to be on the look-out for abdominal distress and faintness of breath. We went home and put Mikey to bed at 1:30 am.

While padding down his pillow, Ian found this in the pillowcase.



So the good news is that Mikey doesn’t swallow huge plastics gems, and doesn’t need surgery. There will be no abdominal distress or faintness of breath.

The bad news is that when asked where something is, if he doesn’t know, he points to his mouth and says he ate it.