After a fun weekend filled with friends, relaxing, church, snow and a trip to the indoor water park, it was a morning of getting back to business. Tim was getting ready for work, Luke was packing up his backpack for school and Jack and I were getting ready to go to preschool.
Sometimes, Jack takes his own sweet time in the shower and I have to remind him that there might be a time crunch if he doesn't get his butt in gear. He had been downstairs for a while so I went down to give him a gentle reminder. When I peeked in the bathroom, the shower was turned off but Jack was in the fetal position on the bottom of the shower stall.
When I asked him what was going on, he replied very calmly, "I'm stuck."
"How are you stuck?" I opened up the shower door.
"My finger..." His left pinky was stuck in one of the holes of the shower drain. It was stuck past the second knuckle.
Keep in mind, this is a child who fuh-reaks out if his shoes aren't tied tight enough. Since there were no hysterics, I didn't take him quite seriously. I giggled and called for Tim to come downstairs. I figured we would get this situation fixed in a few seconds.
When Tim came downstairs, we realized, it might be more serious than we thought. Tim tried plain old pulling. We tried soap and lotion and water and ice. Nothing worked. Both of us kept calm faces but we were internally freaking out. Luke quietly cried in the corner of the room. His empathetic super power was working overtime so he knew it might be serious.
We ended up unscrewing the shower drain so we could get better leverage. Jack's finger was turning blue and we were running out of options so we headed to the ER. On the way, we dropped Luke off at school with the promise that the doctors and nurses at the hospital would know what to do. We also promised to let him know that Jack was okay once we got home.
At the ER, Jack marched in, calm and brave, with a shower drain for an over-sized ring. After trying multiple methods, the doctor and nurses freed Jack's finger. We stopped by Luke's school to give him the update and then started back on our not-so-typical Monday.
We are averaging one ER visit per year and I'm not liking those stats. Oh, the life of boys. Jack's first two visits to the ER were in Charleston, the third in Meridian, now the fourth in Grand Forks. With Luke making an appearance in the Bellingham ER at two days old, our tally is five visits in six years, coast to coast and in the middle. I'd be fine with taking a break from those visits for a few years or twenty. But since we like to live life on the edge and stick our fingers in shower drains, I'm thinking that's not going to happen. I can cross my unrestrained fingers and hope for the best though.
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