Easter Sunday: Happy Endings

I have so many wonderful things to blog about our week in North Dakota visiting friends and family, but I’m actually going to start with the last part first, and get the traumatic part out of the way!

Easter Sunday.  There was the usual drama of getting everyone ready.  There was Easter breakfast at church (delicious sweet rolls and fruit).  There was the joyous church service (hymns with just piano:  Yay! . . . no drums and guitars, which are fine, but it was so nice to have just piano and no other distractions in worship).  There was the frenzy of getting things packed back in our suitcases for the ride back to Minnesota.  There was delicious turkey for lunch.  There was a special ice cream dessert made by Auntie Dot.  And then, right as I was sitting down to eat that cold creaminess, there was a little baby Squirmy under the table who started to cry.  So I picked him up.

It  turned out he was choking.  Not just a little.  Someone across the table noticed it first, and Dr. Peds grabbed him and went into full blown pediatric trauma mode.  Grandma Kathy, a nurse, was right there, and they knew exactly what they were doing.  The baby was blue.  The baby was throwing up.  The baby was crying. The baby was gagging.  The baby was drooling and drooling and drooling, and whatever  was in there, was not appearing.  All we knew about it was that it had a hard edge, and that it had gone down, and not up.  When poor little Squirmy was crying regularly, which was a good thing because we could tell he was obviously able to breathe, Dr. Peds said we were going to the E.R. to get a picture.

We grabbed our shoes.  I sat in the backseat with a vomiting baby over my lap and Dr. Peds drove as fast as he could with the hazard lights on to the E.R. in Valley City.  The hospital was surrounded by a contingency dike for the flooding Sheyenne River, but when we finally found the door to the emergency department we burst in with the baby.  The E.R. staff was a little surprised by the detailed medical-speak report my husband calmly and quickly gave them.  They decided to take some X-rays, and while we waited Squirmy cried and drooled excessively and was miserable.  The E.R. staff said right away that they would need to transfer us to Fargo, probably by ambulance, but in the end, while they were taking the X-Rays, the piece (it turned out to be a flat plastic butterfly the size of a nickel) lodged differently down his throat and suddenly Squirmy was more comfortable.  They gave us the go-ahead to travel to Fargo by car since Dr. Peds knew what he was doing.

The Fargo E.R. nurses were so terrific, and we saw an ENT doctor right away, who decided he would scope out Squirmy’s throat.  They took him up to the operating room, and put him to sleep, found the butterfly and we were good to go.  We had a brief stay up on the pediatric floor to make sure Squirmy was eating and drinking and had no ill effects from the anesthesia, and then we were back on the road to Valley City.  We weren’t able to pack up the car and depart from Valley City until 9:00 p.m., as the sun was setting, which meant that our arrival back home didn’t happen until 3:00 a.m., but we arrived safe and sound, oh so glad to crawl into our own beds!

It was our first E. R. experience for us as parents, and believe me, it was a very scary one that I would not like to repeat.  However, the whole experience really has made me personally reflect on God’s amazing grace and provisions.  No one wants their baby to be in a situation that is so close to ultimate disaster, but God was there providing every single thing that needed to happen to make things work out, (and even if it hadn’t worked out, God would have still been there with abundant grace, providing what we needed emotionally).  Squirmy couldn’t have picked a better time and place to have choked.  We were all right there, so many helping hands.  There were family all over who took care of the big kids, and I didn’t even have to think about them; I could just rush to the E.R.  Dr. Peds and Grandma knew exactly what they were doing and were in a mode of calm medical procedure without panic that only someone who was really well-trained could enter:  their actions were purposeful and efficient.  The ride to the E.R. in Valley City, the scary fast one, was less than 5 minutes away, which is closer than the E.R from my own house.  The doctors and nurses in Fargo were amazing.  Dr. Peds had felt the object, so we knew he needed to go to the E.R. right away and we didn’t wait around wondering what to do.  And of course, we live in a country where hospitals have the equipment to remove plastic snacks baby’s aren’t supposed to eat.  Squirmy was tearing around, back to his normal self within hours.

We are still de-stressing around here.  There are ten million small objects a crawling baby can choke on, and even if I just picked them up all day long, literally, I couldn’t find them all. And so in the end, just like it is with all other areas of life, we have to do our best and trust God for the rest.