Sometimes people think that because you have two kids, you've got this parenting-of-young-children thing under control. As if rookie parent moves suddenly disappear when baby number two arrives and your brain has been implanted with a "expert parent" chip.
We'd been home only 24 hours with Nolan before we made our first call to the pediatrician's office in sheer panic that our precious baby was on his deathbed. We learned he just had uric acid crystals. I thought about this today after I called the pediatrician's office in a less-fraught panic, but a panic nonetheless.
Nol and I were sitting at the kitchen table when I noticed a deep scab in on his finger. As I examined it, it seemed worse than a scab. It had thin little lines on the side, like an insect. A few hours earlier I pulled a tick off Luna. And suddenly that little scab started to look like a tick had embedded into Nol's skin.
I rushed out to the hubs and asked him to look at it, sending Nol into a major tailspin. Think girls are the only ones full of drama? Meet my son.
We scoured the Web in search of photos of embedded ticks (not so easy to find). Then I decided to make the call. Nurse Lisa contacted me within five minutes and after getting the routine details out of the way, she asked me if I had pulled on the wound. Well, no, because every single medical tip says that you never pull on a tick if it's embedded in the skin. And besides, Nol was screaming at the mere mention of the words "touch" and "finger."
"You need to hold him down, and you need to see if you can pick at the wound. Do it. I'll call you back in five minutes." The tone of her voice made it clear she thought I was a little light on the brain cell count. I prefer to think that I was being a Google-educated, cautious parent. Whatever.
Marching orders in hand, I called Nol into the playroom, grabbed a towel for him to bite instead of screaming bloody murder, and told him the doctor said I needed to see if the scab would come off.
"It won't hurt, Mom, right?" he asked. And I, of course, lied through my teeth.
"No, sweets, it won't hurt too much. Mommy will be really careful."
It took a few minutes and some effort, but the tick was not. He just had a funky, deep cut with a weird "design" and none of us have any idea how he got it. He can't even remember. We all did a happy dance -- crisis averted. Then the phone rang. Five minutes had passed.
"It was a cut," I told Nurse Lisa. "Just a deep cut with some weird lines on the side." I rattled on again about how we had just pulled a tick off the dog and how Nol had been in outdoors where ticks were known to reside. We just wanted to check on how to proceed since we thought it could be a tick and every single shred of information we'd read said "CALL THE DOCTOR IF YOU SUSPECT A TICK IS EMBEDDED IN YOUR SKIN!"
"Okay!" she answered, the pitch of her voice heightening on the second syllable. The way you say it when you're thinking, "Dumb ass."
But no, there's no dumb ass here.
Just a rookie parent. For a lifetime.
