Angela looked at me anxiously. “How are you going to get it out?”
That was, in fact, an excellent question. I thought about it for a moment.
“Well …” I said.
Both kids were staring at me.
“I think, I think that the best way to get it out … would be …”
The kids leaned in a little closer.
Rats. I was kind of hoping that they would come up with something.
“Um … okay, let’s try something,” I said. “Danny, take a deep breath in through your mouth, and then blow it out as hard as you can through your nose.”
Danny nodded, sucked up a loud gulp of air, then made a noise through his mouth that sounded like Ffffff … aaahhh!!
“No, no.” I pressed my hand against my forehead and shook my head. “You’re supposed to be blowing out through your nose, not your mouth. The whole idea is that the air goes through your nose and pushes out the shoe. Got it?”
Danny nodded, but he didn’t look so sure.
“Okay, are you ready to try again?” I asked.
He nodded. Then he took a big breath through his mouth and made a pitiful little sniffle through his nose.
I waited.
Danny stared at me.
“Uh … was that it?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. Did it come out?” Danny eagerly looked around the room.
“No.” I rested my head in my hands. “No, it didn’t.” I took a deep breath and tried to refocus. “Here, let’s try this. Press your left nostril shut with your finger. No. Your left one … no, see the one I’m pointing at? The one without the shoe in it. That’s it! Okay, now hold it shut, and then blow as hard as you can out your nose, okay?”
Danny nodded. He pressed against the side of his nose and made a faint sniff.
I ran my hand through my hair. Blowing it out was probably not going to work.
“Okay, don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll just try something else.”
I had no idea what that something else would be, but surely my child wasn’t the first to get a small object lodged in his nostril. I’d never heard of a twenty-two-year-old who’d been walking around for over a decade with a toy permanently stuck up his nose. There had to be some way to get it out.
Angela jumped up. “I know!” she said, running out of the room.
I ruffled Danny’s hair while I wondered what Angela would come back with. A flashlight? A magnifying glass? Something ridiculous, like a hammer?
Danny looked up at me, his eyes huge and terrified. “Is she gonna hurt me?”
“I don’t think so,” I assured him, although I wasn’t completely sure myself.
“Here Danny!” Angela said, running back into the room with the pepper shaker. “Pepper makes people sneeze.” She unscrewed the top. “So take a few good whiffs and you can sneeze it out.”
Huh. That might actually work.
Danny obediently leaned forward and took a few sniffs. He wrinkled his nose a few times, but other than that, nothing happened.
“You’re not getting close enough,” Angela said, practically shoving the pepper up his nose.
Danny sniffed again. Nothing.
“Maybe we need to put some pepper in his nose,” said Angela.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Why not?” Angela asked.
“Call it a hunch,” I said, eying Danny carefully. “Somehow, shoving even more things up his nose just doesn’t sound like the best plan right now.”
“Come on Danny!” Angela yelled, ramming the pepper shaker against his nose. “Breathe in the pepper!”
“Ow!” Danny screeched.
“Angela,” I said, “you can’t force him to …”
“Ah … achoo!” Danny sneezed.
Angela and I leaned forward. We were staring intently to see if a shoe would come flying out of Danny’s nose. Unfortunately, we had no such luck.
I tilted Danny’s head and looked up his nose. “No change,” I reported. “It’s really stuck up there. I don’t think sneezing is going to do it.”
“So what are we going to do?” Angela asked.
I sighed. “I think we might have to go to the pediatrician.”
I’d been dreading this but didn’t see any way around it. I looked at my watch. It was almost ten minutes after 5. Of course it was. My children didn’t have the courtesy to shove small objects into their body cavities during office hours.
“Scratch that,” I said. “The doctor’s office just closed for the day. We may have to go to the emergency room.”
Danny scrambled to his feet. “The emergency room? Does that mean we get to ride in an ambulance?”
I shook my head. “No. I’ll drive us.”
“Oh.” His face fell for a second, then lit up again. “Will I need an operation? Are they gonna drill a hole through my nose?”
Angela made a face. “Eww!”
“Will I have my own hospital room?” Danny asked. “And will I get to ride up and down the hall in a wheelchair?”
“I don’t think it’s going to be anything that exciting,” I said. “Here, let me call your dad and tell him what’s going on. You guys go get your shoes and coats on. Oh, and both of you go to the bathroom.”
The kids scurried out of the room and I went to the living room. I dialed Steve’s work number.
“Hello.”
“Hi, it’s me,” I said. “Danny has a Barbie shoe stuck up his nose and it’s jammed up there too far for me to get it out. We tried to get him to sneeze it out, but that didn’t work, even when we used pepper. So I was thinking of taking him to the emergency room. Does that sound like a good plan to you?”
There was silence on the other end.
“He has a what stuck up where?” Steve asked.
“A Barbie shoe, up his nose.”
Silence again.
“How?” Steve asked.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t in the room at the time.” I glanced down the hall toward the kids’ rooms. “I think I’m afraid to ask.”
Steve gave a long sigh. “Yeah, sure, take him to the ER. Do you want me to try to get off work a little early so I can meet you guys there?”
“Thanks, but no. I think we can manage. The ER is way on the other side of town from your office anyway.”
“Okay … well, good luck,” said Steve.
“Thanks. Bye.”
I hung up and called down the hall, “Are you kids ready to go?”
Danny appeared with an arm in one coat sleeve and the other sleeve dragging on the floor. He was wearing a sneaker on one foot and the other foot only had a red sock.
“I can’t find my other sneaker,” he said.
I took a deep breath and tried not to lose my temper. “What do you mean, you can’t find it?”
He looked slightly puzzled. “I mean … I went in my closet and I only saw one sneaker, and I don’t know where the other one is.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” I said, heading past him toward his closet. “Hey, Angela, are you ready to go?”
“Almost,” she called from her bedroom. “I just want to change clothes first.”
“Change clothes?” I rolled my eyes. “You don’t happen to know where Danny’s other sneaker is, do you?” I realized that this was probably a pointless question.
“It should be in his closet,” she informed me.
“Yes, you’d think so,” I muttered, crawling around on the closet floor, shoving aside a Lightning McQueen baseball cap, two candy wrappers, a green stuffed frog that I forgot he even had, several scattered Matchbox cars, and a library copy of Katy and the Big Snow. But there was no sign of any sneaker.
“Danny,” I said, sitting back on my heels, “let’s not waste time worrying about this. Why don’t you just wear your dress shoes?”
“They don’t fit me anymore.”
I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “What do you mean, they don’t fit you? Since when?”
“I don�
�t know. Since the day I tried to put them on and they didn’t fit.”
“Okay, I’m ready,” Angela announced, walking into the room wearing the princess costume she’d worn for Halloween.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Angela looked hurt. “I wanted to wear something special. Don’t you think I look pretty?”
“Yes. Yes, you look very pretty,” I told her. “But I’m not sure that …”
Hey eyes pleaded at me from behind her glasses.
“Okay, fine.” I flipped my hand in the air. “Wear that if you want to.”
Angela smiled. In fact, she was beaming.
I turned back to the closet, scooped the stray candy wrappers off the floor, and threw them in the trash basket. “Danny, just try the dress shoes on anyway. Maybe you just imagined that they were too tight, or maybe you were … I don’t know … wearing really thick socks that day or something.” I passed him the shoes with one hand while trying to gather up the Matchbox cars with the other.
“Are we leaving yet?” Angela asked.
“We have to finish getting your brother dressed first.”
Danny put his unshod foot into the loafer. “Mom, it doesn’t fit!” he insisted. “It hurts! It’s too tight!”
I tried to push his heel into the shoe.
“Ow!” he yelled.
He was right. They didn’t fit anymore, at all.
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered, tugging the shoe off his foot. “You’ve probably only worn these shoes three times since we bought them.”
“I told you,” he said.
“Are we leaving yet?” Angela asked again.
I threw the shoes into the hallway. “We’ll put those in a charity bag later. Are those the only two pairs of shoes you have?”
“Uh-huh,” said Danny.
“Well, we can’t have you walking through the hospital parking lot with no shoes on.” I thought for a moment, then I tossed him the bear claw slippers that Steve’s mother had given both kids last Christmas. “Here, you’ll just have to wear your slippers today.”
“Oh, wow!” Angela said. “If he gets to wear his bear slippers I wanna wear mine too.” She ran out of the room.
Danny slid the bear claws onto his feet, oblivious to the fact that half his coat was still dangling off him.
“Here,” I said, “let me help you finish getting your coat on.”
“Don’t forget Bunny-Bun!” Angela cried as she ran back into the room. She’d accessorized her pink princess costume with her bear claw slippers.
“Um,” I said, “that’s an interesting combination.”
She glanced down at her outfit, then back up at me with a worried look. “You’re right,” she said. “Let me go change clothes again.” She turned around and headed toward her room.
“No! Wait!” I yelled. “Please! That’s not what I meant! We don’t have time to …”
The slam of her bedroom door cut me off. I turned to Danny who was finally dressed, albeit with bear claw slippers on his feet.
“We can’t leave without Bunny-Bun,” he said, “and I don’t know where he is.”
I buried my face in my hands and took a deep breath. It’s a good thing that the emergency room never closes, I thought.
* * *
We walked into the emergency room, both kids with bear claw slippers on their feet. I signed in and we sat down in the waiting room.
“How are you doing, Danny?” I asked as I started filling out the forms. “Does it hurt at all?”
Danny was clutching Bunny-Bun, who, it turned out, had been sitting next to the bathroom sink. He scrunched up his face, sat very still, and pondered the sensations in his nose—or lack thereof—for a moment. “It doesn’t really hurt. It just feels sort of …” he sniffed a few times, “clogged up.”
I nodded. “Well, I guess that’s why God gave us two nostrils … just in case one of them accidentally gets plugged up with a piece of your sibling’s toy.” I continued filling in our address and phone number on a form.
“Can we stop at the store and buy me a new Barbie on the way home?” Angela asked. “I want a bathing beauty Barbie.”
“A new Barbie?” I asked. “Why?”
“Why?” Angela yelled. “Because my Barbie’s ruined. I can’t have her just walking around with one shoe forever.”
“I’m pretty sure we’ll get the shoe out,” I said, scribbling down Stephanie’s name and phone number as an emergency contact.
“Eww!” Angela said. “It’ll be gross. It’ll have boogers and snot all over it.”
“Hey!” said Danny. “My nose is not full of boogers and snot!”
“Everybody’s nose is full of boogers and snot!” Angela said, her voice getting louder. “That’s what a nose is for!”
A mother holding a sleepy toddler girl on her lap was sitting three chairs away from us. She looked in our direction.
I chuckled and faintly smiled at her. She didn’t smile back.
“Listen,” I hissed at the kids, “let’s not scream about boogers in public places, okay?”
“She started it,” Danny said, sticking his finger in Angela’s face.
She smacked his finger aside. “Get your finger out of my face. And stop sticking my things up your nose.”
“I only stuck one thing up my nose,” Danny retorted.
The mother of the sleepy girl continued staring at us. I chuckled again and gave her a little wave.
I set the pen down on the clipboard. “Danny, just out of curiosity, exactly why did you stick a Barbie shoe up your nose in the first place?”
He looked at me, surprised. “I wanted to see how far it would fit.” He said it as if it should have been obvious.
“Uh-huh.” I rolled my eyes and went to turn in all the paperwork.
About ten minutes later a nurse called for us. I followed her down the hall to the examination room, the kids shuffling behind me in their bear claw feet.
The nurse took Danny’s temperature and checked his blood pressure. “The doctor will be with you shortly,” she said, sticking the chart in the door and heading out.
Twenty-five minutes later we were still waiting for the doctor, the kids’ eyes glued to the cartoons on the TV. The word shortly seemed to have a different meaning to people in the medical field. Although, to be fair, they probably figured a kid with a toy jammed up his nose could wait while they tended to the kids who were, say, bleeding profusely or knocked unconscious.
The door finally opened. A short man with dark hair walked in holding a chart. “Hi there, I’m Dr. Ballon.” He shook my hand without looking up from the chart. “I see we have a foreign object in the nose, is that correct?”
“Yup.” Danny leaned his head back and pushed the end of his nose up with his thumb.
“I see …” Dr. Ballon studied the inside of Danny’s nose for a moment. He walked over to the counter and pulled something that looked like tweezers out of a glass canister. He inserted the tweezers in Danny’s nose, pulled out the pink shoe, wrapped it in a tissue, and handed it to me. “There you go.”
I stared at the wad of tissue in my hand. The entire procedure had taken less than six seconds.
“You’re done,” Dr. Ballon said, scribbling something on the chart. “They’ll be here in a minute to check you out. Have a good evening.” He put the chart back in the door and shut it behind him with a click.
The three of us sat in silence for a moment.
“Is that it?” Danny asked. He sounded disappointed.
“Apparently so,” I said, tucking the wrapped shoe into my purse. I’ll soak it in alcohol to de-booger it when we get home, I thought.
Danny sighed.
The door opened again. A heavyset woman with her hair in a tight bun backed into the room pulling a computer table on wheels. “Okay Mrs. Hershey, we’re going to check you out.” She hit a bunch of keys, then said, “You have a copay of two hundred fifty dollars.”
“What!” I yelped. “
Two hundred fifty dollars!”
“That’s correct,” she said calmly, still looking at the screen. “Will that be cash or charge?”
“That’s crazy!” I yelled. “The doctor was in the room for less than thirty seconds. He didn’t even need a medical degree to do what he did! I could have done that myself if I’d thought of it.”
Ms. Tight Bun was unmoved by my outburst.
“Your copay for today is two hundred fifty dollars,” she repeated.
“That can’t be right,” I said, hunting around in my purse. I opened my wallet, yanked out my insurance card, and squinted at the fine print on the bottom. “Aha! There!” I yelled, sticking the card in her face. “It says right there that the urgent care copay is seventy-five dollars! Ha!”
She glanced at the card. “That’s the in-network copay. We’re outside your network.”
“What?” I pulled the card back and squinted at it again, not even sure what I was looking for. “Since when? We were here two years ago for my daughter, and it cost … something like … well, I don’t know, but it wasn’t anywhere near two hundred fifty dollars.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Well, has your insurance changed?”
I opened my mouth, then snapped it shut. I remembered that Steve’s insurance had changed over the summer. So not only did our monthly premiums go up, but now we had crappier coverage, higher copays, and fewer options.
“I can’t believe this,” I muttered, handing my credit card to Ms. Tight Bun. I signed the computerized receipt, mumbled a thank you, and took each child by the hand to lead them out.
“Stupid insurance companies,” I said under my breath as I snapped the car into reverse and backed out of the parking spot. “Who’s running this country anyway? I bet nobody in France has to pay two hundred fifty dollars to have a doctor slide tweezers into their kid’s nose.”
The more I thought about it, the angrier and more stressed out I got. I drove all the way home with my jaw clenched and my hands tightly gripping the steering wheel. I vaguely recall overhearing Danny explaining the difference between Marvel and DC Comics to Angela in the back seat.
When we got home I walked through the front door and took approximately six steps before tripping over a pile of about thirty plastic zoo animals. “Who left all this here?!” I yelled, picking up a plastic giraffe and tossing it onto the couch. “And look at this whole room! It’s a mess! It’s always a mess!” I sank into a chair, no longer feeling angry, but simply exhausted. “No wonder we couldn’t find your shoe.”
Confessions of a Wedding Musician Mom Page 8