CULTURE
Guitar Man
Last week we got my son’s report card. He’s a sophomore in high
school. It was all good – his first straight A’s since fifth grade.
At parent-teacher conferences, they couldn’t say enough nice things
about this kid. “He’s a big-picture guy,” glowed one teacher.
“A deep thinker,” said another, and even, “A shining star
in a sea of mediocrity” (AP English).
That’s interesting, because earlier this fall the last words his dad and I would have used to describe Ned were“deep thinker.” A better tag would have been “American Idiot,” with all due respect to Green Day, the boy’s favorite band. I am thinking specifically of the night we rushed to meet Ned at the local emergency room, after he was admitted for – well, I’ll get to that. For now let’s just say that the experience was a painful one, and how it all went down was not clear at first.
The night in question, his dad and I had gone out with friends and left Ned at home to babysit his little sister. Early in the evening he’d called my cell phone to ask if it was OK for three girls who had stopped by the house to stay and “hang out.” I said “sure” to Ned and “What could happen?” to myself – right after letting the requisite sex-drugs-booze-car crash set of worries flare up and fade.
Though 15, Ned was still at a developmental stage where his idea of a fun evening meant ordering a pizza and watching a Cubs game. Girls seemed drawn to his curly hair and sweet demeanor – and they might come over – but he wasn’t interested in hanky-panky (at least not with three at once, I reasoned). We live in Indiana, not the O.C., and besides, his little sister would rat on him if he did anything really bad. Or so I hoped.
Twenty minutes later my cell phone rang again. This time it was our next-door neighbor, who is a big-time college baseball coach. His voice on the other end of the line conveyed a practiced calm and certain urgency – perhaps because he has spent a career delivering bad news to parents about their kids’ injuries.
“Ned is here,” he began.
“OK,” I said, bracing for the worst.
“He … swallowed a guitar pick,” said Coach.
“OK,” I said.
“Do you want us to take him to the ER?”
It’s every parent’s nightmare to hear that question, but there, absurdly, it was. As my husband and I high-tailed it to the hospital we tried to piece the facts together. Apparently, sometime after the girls stopped by, the wayward musical accessory had found its way from Ned’s hand to his esophagus, where it seemed to have lodged mid-way on the path to his stomach. His breathing was not impaired but it hurt like hell, and he knew he had to see a doctor fast.
Coach’s wife drove Ned to the ER and a few minutes later we were there, too. A saint, she departed with a promise to take care of Ned’s little sister.
Settling in at the hospital, we were relieved to learn that the gastroenterologist on call was Dr. G., who had performed my husband’s first-ever colonoscopy the year before. I realized that in a small Midwestern town, there are seldom more than two degrees of separation between you and someone who has gone up a family member’s intestinal tract.
It turned out that Dr. G. was also a classical guitar player. Our eyes widened when he greeted Ned by shouting, “I need a guitar pick! You got a guitar pick?” But he was serious. He wanted to know if Ned could show him a duplicate of the one he’d swallowed, to get a sense of the size and difficulty it would have passing through his system. Unfortunately our teen hadn’t had the prescience to pack an extra pick en route to the ER, so he sketched an approximation for the good doctor instead.
Meanwhile Ned’s pain was intensifying, so the nurse hooked him up to a morphine IV. Ever so briefly, anxiety over my son’s inevitable, tragic future as an opium addict flashed and faded.
Dr. G. looked at the x-rays and quickly determined that the pick had to come out. Even if it squeezed through the lower esophageal sphincter and descended to the stomach on its own, he said, this particular pick – a Fender medium – was not likely to clear the pyloric and ileocaecal valves. As a physician and a musician, he recommended surgery.
We nodded weakly. As the morphine did its magic and he waited to go into surgery, Ned was able to relax a little. He borrowed my phone to call his girl friends, who had been left hanging in the driveway when he’d fled to the ER. As he tried to reassure Lola, his best buddy of the threesome, that he’d be fine, we could hear her agitated response quite clearly. “Omigod, I’m so sorry,” she wailed. “It’s all my fault!”
Ned flipped the phone shut. Feeling calm but curious, I couldn’t help asking, “Why would Lola say it’s all her fault?”
Well, said Ned slowly, it turned out that when
the girls came over, they went down to the basement to watch TV. Ned was playing
his guitar, they were talking, and Lola had suggested they all play the “Ha-ha-ha”
game.
“The ha-ha-ha game?” my husband asked. We leaned a little closer.
Ned wasn’t really sure what the ha-ha-ha game involved, but his dad was once in high school and remembers it well. Apparently a group of people lies down on the floor, each with his or her head on another person’s stomach. The first person laughs – ha-ha-ha – and the movement of her stomach causes the next person to laugh, and the next person, and so on down the line. Then, and especially if they are all teenagers, they have unprotected group sex (another involuntary brain flash).
In Ned’s case, the ha-ha-ha game was over before it got started. Once he set down his guitar and put the pick in his teeth, the aforementioned chain of events was unleashed. As a mother – and yes, a former adolescent who had cornered boys in the basement more times than I’d care to admit – I have to say I was relieved that things ended prematurely.
Meanwhile back in the hospital the surgery had begun, and as we waited outside the operating room the minutes ticked by like hours. At one point a nurse burst out to the hallway and ran for a storage area, carrying a mysterious package back into the operating room. More time passed.Finally, Dr. G. emerged with a grin. “It’s a boy!” he announced cheerfully.
As Ned dozed under the anesthesia, Dr. G. provided a blow-by-blow of the procedure. He said he’d tried using one kind of tube to wrest the pick from the esophagus, but the little devil slipped down into the stomach and had to be fished out with a different gizmo (which is what the nurse had run to find). After several failed attempts he was able to pull the pick back up the way it came, but the slippery contents of Ned’s stomach made the task difficult. “What did eat for dinner, anyway?” complained the doctor. “That was nasty.”
Soon after, Dr. G. departed, shaking our hands and leaving us with two souvenirs. The first was a digital photo showing two different views of the foreign body as it made its voyage through our son. The second was the bright blue Fender medium that had caused all the trouble – stowed safely in a childproof medicine bottle. I couldn’t help remembering how at the end of Curious George Goes to the Hospital, a favorite of preschoolers everywhere, the nurse sends the little monkey home with the puzzle piece he’d ingested.
When Ned came to, he kept asking the same question: “Is it out?” I’d show him the pick in the medicine bottle; he’d clutch it with a grin and flop back to sleep on the gurney. We repeated this routine for about an hour, until eventually he was awake enough to put his pants on and head home.
The last thing to do was fill out insurance forms, which seemed pretty straightforward. Our policy covered ER visits, but the only thing that worried me was a place on one of the forms entitled “Reason for visit.” Since the computer allowed only 16 spaces for an answer, the nurse had typed in “Swallowed guitar.” Would our insurance company contest the claim?
Either way, the ordeal was over for now. Walking out the hallway with our boy supported between us, gathering sympathetic glances from parents who assumed we’d picked him up after a drug overdose or a DUI, his dad and I exchanged sighs. “If this is the worst thing you’re sent to the hospital for in the next five years, I’ll be very happy,” I told Ned.
My words seemed to register. A few minutes later we were home, and as Ned crawled into bed he hugged me long and hard and said thank you. I think he was grateful that his parents had taken care of him when he needed it but also, that we hadn’t gotten mad or started a single sentence with the words, “How many times have I told you to keep that thing out of your mouth?”
I will say this. When I was a teenage girl, I spent endless hours trying to solve the mystery of teenage boys. What did they do? I wondered. What were they thinking about? Who did they love? After living with my own boy all these years and spending a night with him in the ER, I realize I now know the answers to those questions. What did he do? Many stupid things. What was he thinking about? Not much. And who did he love? Me.
That’s why I still can’t get mad at him, even this week when I wrote checks for the last of the hospital bills. Our health insurance covers most of them, but the total cost of the little episode was staggering. The final bill from the ER was $ 4,264, or just over a thousand dollars per hour. Dr. G.’s fee – worth every penny – was $ 745. All I consider is the value of seeing my curly-haired guitar man sleeping safely in his bed that night when it was all over. That, as every parent of a teenager knows, was priceless.
Ha-ha-ha.
