The Dangers of Toast

So we had our first real trip to the children’s hospital last weekend.  The culprit?  Toast.

It was my first weekend after returning to work to a new position, and on Saturday, I was drained.  On Sunday?  We had high hopes.  We were going to the home and design show.  We were going to take Kenzie walking places!  Maybe go to Zellers and get some cool new sippy cups.  Wow, I think that last sentence was the moment I realized… I’ve really become a parent.  Zellers is a destination and sippy cups is the highlight.  Awesome!

Anyway, the point is we had big plans for a couple of elderly folks (as my cousin’s wife/cousin-wife Megan pointed out, I’ve “become an old lady”.  And yes, I called her my cousin-wife.  If you read this Megan, you know I mean it!)

So we decided, since we were up and about and seizing the day, we would go to breakfast.  Kenzie being Kenzie, she wanted to eat everything we were eating.  She had some scrambled eggs, even a piece of potato.  At the very end, we decided to let her taste Gary’s rye toast.  And guess what?  She loved it.

A few minutes later, I noticed she was rubbing her eye a lot, and there was some redness in her skin around it.  She was tearing up like something was in her eye. 

I’ve had this happen before, with eyelashes and the like and have gotten them out pretty easily, so I took a look and noticed this distinct brown spot on her eye.  It was weird, it was basically sitting on her iris, but moving as she changed the direction she looked (unlike most things you get in your eye, which float all over the place).  I tried to get it out a couple of times unsuccessfully, but quickly realized that I wasn’t willing to do more than rudimentary attempts at something like this.  If I hurt her eyesight, I would never get over it.

Off to the urgent care clinic we go.  Why urgent care?  Well, after the initial crying and irritation she got used to it, and so we would be waiting potentially a LONG time at the children’s hospital on a Sunday.  Plus, we figured they just flush it out and we’d be on our way.

So we get there, take a number, I mentally calculate approximately 15 patients before us so I can start counting down to our turn.  Kenzie, meanwhile, is having THE TIME OF HER LIFE.  Sick people? Awesome!  I want to throw myself towards them and, in the case of the woman sitting RIGHT NEXT TO ME, I am going to stare at her coughs from about 8 inches away every time she coughs.  The alternative?  Standing for two hours.

So after about an hour and a half everyone in the clinic is watching her, wondering why the hell we’re here, I’m sure, because our kid is having a BLAST and must not be sick, but also laughing at her and her antics, which included: giggling at the texture of the shiny posters on the wall, running her fingers against them, tearing them off and us putting them back up, making PYEW PYEW sounds like she’s shooting a gun and flying an airplane, and no, I have no idea where she learned that.  My best guess is she “discovered” a sensation or sound she likes to make with her mouth, and now will make it continuously for the next 4-6 weeks.  Or she’s been watching too much CSI.  I digress.

So we finally get upgraded to the “waiting closer to the examination rooms but not quite area” fortunately with less sick people and more broken limbs (well, fortunately for the likelihood of Kenzie catching something, not so much for them), and then, eventually, in an examination room.  They ask us a number of questions and then tell us that, as she is too young to understand “hold still while we flush your eye out,” she’s going to have to go to the Children’s Hospital.  Awesome.  He prints us up a report which, I swear to God, says “temperature 36, foreign object in eye” to BRING TO HOSPITAL, and then sends us on our way.  Because that information is CRUCIAL to this process.  Oh, and he casually mentions it could be a cyst.  YAY!

So we get to the hospital; Kenzie is finally sleeping, which helps, but the kid in front of us is vomiting.  A lot.  So it wasn’t looking good.

We wait another hour or so (I don’t know - somehow it went from 11am to 4pm), at which point they see us and tell us they are going to flush her eye which should hopefully remove the object.  They do.  It isn’t pretty.  Gary actually left the room at one point it was so bad.  I held her, with at least the hope that the more still she is, the quicker it will be over.  After several minutes (Gary would describe it as more like 15 minutes - it did feel like an eternity), they determine that it’s not coming out and they need a proper opthamologist.  Fortunately, one is available for an appointment at 5pm at the eye institute.

As soon as the guy walks in, you can tell he knows what he is doing.  He takes a look on the eye machines, gives me some tips on best ways to hold babies for procedures like these, puts a few drops in and brushes it off with a q-tip at the suggestion of the other doctor with him.  He says “yep, looks like toast!”, briefly considers setting another appointment but then decides it looks so good that we should only come back if we see any issues.  And that was that, our first hospital visit!