Blood from a stone…
Whoever first said, “You can’t get blood from a stone” was an idiot. I just got back from the hospital with my one-year-old son where he had to have surgery to remove a stone that was lodged in his right bronchial tube for 10 days!!! About a week and a half ago my family and I were camping and white water rafting/kayaking with three other families, more to come on that trip in a very near post, when my youngest son put a handful of pea gravel into his mouth. This is not an uncommon occurrence. The cat would eat a pile of radioactive scorpion tails tied together with barbed wire and soaked in vermouth if he could get his hands on them. I walked over to him and did the regular, “No, no, spit it out” routine and he did, for the most part. He must have missed one in the expectorating because he started to gag and cough pretty vigorously. I looked in his mouth and saw a little piece of gravel in his throat. So I did what anyone would have done at that point, I put my finger in his throat to try and get the choking hazard out. This had roughly the same effect as poking a feeding rhino in the eye with a flaming baton. He didn’t like it much and showed me by nearly dismembering one of my fingers. This, as you can see, wouldn’t have made much sense because then he would have had a piece of pea gravel, which was only pushed farther down by my attempts to remove it, as well as a finger blocking his airway. I am glad he thought better of biting my finger off and just decided to swear at me in baby language instead. He cried for a couple of mintues and then settled down so my wife and I thought he had swallowed it and would deliver it back to the soil in a couple of days.
The camping trip regrettably ended and we headed home where we noticed a little bit of a rasp in my son’s breathing but attributed it to the dust and camping. Over the next couple of days his cough didn’t get any better and it didn’t get any worse and he had an appointment with his doctor in a couple of weeks so we decided to keep an eye on it and just wait and see. Well a couple of days ago he developed a cough that kind of sounded like you where choking Elmo while kicking him in the giblets repeatedly. At first it was only an isolated incident but when it kept happening over the course of two days we decided to take him to urgent care. Here we got an X-ray on his chest and found an almost almond-sized piece of pea gravel lodged just at the top of his lung in the bronchial tube. We were off to Children’s Hospital and the land of teensy little operating instruments.
We were admitted overnight and the surgery happened at about 10:00am the next morning. Now I know this was probably a traumatic experience for the little guys but I do not think I have ever seen anything so funny as a one-year-old coming out of anesthesia. When we walked back to the recovery room we could hear the nurses laughing before we even got there. Think back to high school parties when you were a senior. Remember the freshman that would always show up and drink too much trying to impress the seniors but end up naked on the pool table mumbling incoherent song lyrics while others at the party prodded him in the stomach with a yard stick because it would make him giggle? It was kind of like that but without the hangover and, I’m sure, much more expensive.
The surgery itself lasted a grand total of about 16 minutes and the doctor gave us the piece of gravel in a cup. The only dilemma I am currently facing is what to do with the pebble. I am thinking that I may have it set in a chunk of amber and mounted on the end of a cane. It would be my pimp stick but I am open to suggestions.
