In fact, a quick review of visits reveals that - while I have been a patient twice - I have accompanied a family member to the emergency room a grand total of 20 times in my 23 years of married life.
So the other night, while sitting at my mother's bedside at four in the morning waiting for her dangerously-low blood sugar levels to rise, I knew I was in familiar territory. And so it was that my mind inevitably started wandering to other fond memories of time spent in the ER.
Let me just tell you for starters that the Spin family does not spring from the most graceful stock. My children have broken various bones while Irish dancing, playing basketball, falling off curbs, walking down stairs, passing each other in the hallway, and strolling along a boardwalk. And as my clumsy children have grown older and less prone to falling, my aging parents seem to have become more so. What's more . . . bouts with A.D.D., arthritis, and autoimmune diseases have caused my children to show up in the ER presenting some pretty wacky symptoms.
But take note, if you will, of the eerie similarities in some of our other emergency room visits:
- Trigger broke a foot on three separate occasions. I once had to dash to an emergency room in a neighboring state when Veggie lost all feeling in her feet.
- One summer Veggie broke her right arm first and fractured her left arm four weeks later.
- My daughters have gone to the ER to have both an appendix and a forgotten feminine protection product removed (not in the same visit, mind you. . . )
- Trigger was in the emergency room exactly one-year-to-the-day after having been treated there for an identical ailment.
- I was rushed to the ER after falling up the stairs; Veggie after falling down.
- And Ponzi was placed in the same bay of the same ER two days in a row.
- Last summer, after an endless ER wait with my father, my sister's husband surprised us with a cooler containing some well-deserved vodka drinks. The summer before that, vodka consumption was the surprise cause of not one. . . but TWO. . . of my daughters being transported to the same New York City emergency room from a rock concert.
Like I said. . . familiar territory
