Boy, Oh Boy!

Ahhh, nothing like the hustle and bustle of the last few days before Christmas, all the good food and fitting into dress clothes to get you thinking about stomachs, huh?

Ever seen the inside of one? Totally wild.

I had that privilege just last night.

Oh, don't worry...I'm not talking about the contents of ones stomach...I'm talking about the actual inside lining one.

As in pictures taken by fancy scope cameras in a hospital.



Stomachs are surprisingly pink and beautiful, even with bubbling gastric juices. Fearfully and wonderfully made, for sure.

But wait...what is this?



A net? In the stomach?

Why yes, yes it is.

Why, you ask? Why on earth would a net be in a stomach?

To retrieve this, of course.



Here's a close-up.



Yes, the Frump Family had to spend a day in the ER yesterday for a little surgical procedure called an "Upper Endoscopy", which is where they move foreign objects from the upper 'end' of a body. (Love how they add oscopy to upper end to make it sound really official. And to distinguish it from it's sister procedure the colonoscopy.)

I'll give y'all one guess as to why, or rather, who was behind our trip to the hospital...



Yep. Our little Judah. Looks so sweet, doesn't he?

True to form, he couldn't have picked a normal, hum-drum average day to "swallow da money".

Not Judah.

No, he had to go and pick the day after the Blizzard of '08.

When our desert was covered in highly unusual amounts of snow. (I'm just not buying all that global warming stuff.)



We had a total of14 inches at our house and upwards of a couple of feet elsewhere in our area.

This not only meant that school was called off for three days essentially extending Christmas break for students and teachers in our community (which should have been a wonderful, celebrated thing), but it also meant that getting anywhere would be very, very dangerous.

They don't have snow plows around here like they did when we lived in Minnesota.

Believe me, you haven't lived until your toddler is clutching his stomach and moaning in pain, "My tummy h-u-u-u-uurts!" while squirming uncomfortably in his carseat as you very, very slowly navigate treacherous snow and ice covered side streets trying to get to the nearest E.R. all while frantically calling your insurance provider on your cell phone hoping beyond hope they won't make you go clear to the hospital in the next town (as is their usual M.O.) and worrying about such things as quarters blocking air passageways.

We'd had the foresight to hold out a handful of coins and ask him to point to which type he'd swallowed. Each time he pointed to the nickel. It eased my mind somewhat on the way there thinking that at least he hadn't pointed to the larger quarter, but still...could we trust him to know the difference?

Of course, our journey wouldn't be complete without having to first sit in the ultra-crowded ER with people hacking up their lungs and spewing flu and who-knows-what-else type of germs into the air we had to share while sitting across from bloody victims of snow-play and sledding catastrophes.

Who would have thought that a cozy, idyllic morning of bundled up boys playing in the soft, pillowy snow would have ended the way it did?

I am very thankful our ER visit didn't involve blood.

I can't handle blood. Especially blood issuing forth from my children.

And my husband can't handle me when I'm hysterical worried and/or fainted dead away.

It's bad enough that to remove a coin from where it was lodged in our son's 'tummy' involved x-rays, as well as a surgical procedure in the operating room.

The G.I. Specialist, thankfully, turned around on his way home to come back for this emergency...otherwise we might have had to transport him between hospitals.

God bless both him and the anesthesiologist who probably would have preferred going home and sipping coffee beside their fireplaces in that dreadful weather after a long, long day in the ER, but returned to help our son.

When we thanked them profusely for everything, they both said very graciously, "My pleasure". As Jeff's great-uncle Lawrence would have said, "They be good people."

Of course this tale wouldn't be complete without informing you that our 'precautionary' visit to the hospital also included hearing big scary words like, "Pre-op", and "There are risks" and "It could take a while to bring him out of the anesthesia".

Oh, and did I mention that they'd need to insert all manner of tubes and scopes and a sheath to protect his vocal chords and windpipe for his 'small procedure'?

Or that Judah was rushed off to the OR on a gurney with strangers and only a toy pony to cling to for comfort?

This brought back to the surface a lot of the same unpleasant feelings I had during the first few days of his life which were spent in the NICU.

I fear that with this child, I am destined to feel that horrible cold-fingers-of-dread feeling grip me at least two or three times a year.

Did I mention the expended MATCHES I found in the sink two days ago when I went in to help him after he'd gone potty? After being out of my sight for only one minute? Dear Lord, help us all.

He is, as my grandma would have said, "A quick little operator". Gets into BIG scrapes in very small allotments of time.

But who would have thought he'd find 'moneys' in his bed, of all places, especially while he was supposed to be napping?

Turns out that what had been rattling around inside the G.I. Joe tank he asked to sleep with wasn't G.I. Joe gear, but was in fact coinage.

Later, when Jeff asked, "Why did you swallow the money?" Judah replied simply, "I wanted to."

Which sends cold chills down my spine.

Especially since I've been re-reading an old favorite fook, Anne of Avonlea.

All you Anne of Green Gables fans might remember the problem child dear little boy named Davy Keith (who came to Green Gables to live along with his twin sister Dora) and gave Anne and Marilla a real run for their money?

Let me put it this way...I used to enjoy reading about that precocious child.

Now, I find myself wondering if such antics are my lot in life.

Scares the bejeebers out of me.

Because to get our little Judah to cooperate for all the pre-op procedures (like inserting the little port where they would both draw blood and insert meds), we were forced to resort to bribery once again.

The Xray tech and the nurses gave him these:



And then we stupidly went and promised him a G.I. Joe toy.

Because how can you not when you see him come to the realization that he's going down the long sterile hallway without you? Especially when he says "But I want you to go wif me, mama!" and is threatening to tear up and do that pitiful little trembly lip thing...well, you'd do just about anything to avoid that.

It helped, of course, that the nurse introduced "Bucky" the stuffed pony right about then. "Here, Judah, you take care of Bucky so he's not afraid, okay?" Happily occupied with this task, he didn't even cry.

Even if we felt like doing so just thinking about it in the waiting room.

The doctors and nurses reported that he took everything like a champ. Everything went according to plan without any problems, the net apparently preventing any injury on the way back out of his esophogus.

He even woke up from the anesthesia smiling and in good humor, chattering like a magpie and asking about everything within reach.

True to his word, it was a nickel!



When we finally got to see him, he showed us his "Chwistmas wight" (the pulse/Ox monitor) which he wore on his finger like E.T. phoning home. He also enjoyed that cool hospital bed that went up and down like an "elabator".

I guess my biggest fear is that with all the excitement of his experience there, and all the cool stuff he got just for "swallowing da money"...





...is that he might pull other crazy stunts to land him back in the hospital again. Oh, Lord, have mercy.