I wonder if Poison Control (1-800-222-1222) keeps track of how many times you call, and when you hit a certain number they call DSS. We are on our way.
There was the time that I was oiling a piece of wood furniture, put down the Lemon Oil, and when I turned around Lee (about a year old) was drinking out of it like a bottle. I believe that time the woman on the phone said "if she'd drank any significant amount she'd be vomiting, so nothing to worry about."
Last week, cleaning out my car prompted another call to Poison Control. A few weeks earlier while Bridges was driving the girls back from Loon, Lee was getting restless, so he gave her a first aid kit to look at. Much of the contents ended up all over the floor of the car. When I finally got around to cleaning it up, I found half of a broken thermometer in Lee's car seat. I could not find the other half of the thermometer anywhere. Lee claimed it was already broken, and I tended to believe her because I think she would have remembered breaking something like that. But even so, where was the other half? Where was the mercury? Yikes....
A call to the pediatrician did nothing to comfort me as they referred me to Poison Control. But once again the folks at Poison Control were relaxed about it. They told me to dispose of the mercury properly if I find it, but that there was no need to worry because even if she had swallowed it, it would pass right through her. That response seemed very strange to me, given all the hoopla over eating tuna sandwiches. But I figured they know what they're talking about. And really, that thermometer was most likely broken long before we even put the kit in the car.
Then there were the other toxin-related incidents which didn't technically involve Poison Control. Once (and this is gross so you can skip this part if you want) we left Lee alone in the basement for all of one minute, and when I came back downstairs she had the scoop from the kitty litter box in her mouth. Which is in itself pretty disgusting, but is worse when you consider that we had just had Oscar treated because he was leaving little worms all over the house (just one reason I will never have an outdoor cat again). That time involved a call to my sister Deb, who is a veterinarian, as well as the pediatrician. Deb told us that the worms probably couldn't live in a human host, but the pediatrician's office was pretty concerned and wanted to run blood work on her. In the end we listened to Deb, and figured if she started to show symptoms of having worms, we'd worry about it then.
The last similar incident involved rabies. Last summer we kept finding mouse droppings in the house at the lake. Only it seemed kind of strange because even after we moved Lee's bed into the middle of the room, the droppings appeared on the bed the next morning. To make a long (at least several weekends) story (which did involve the capture of at least one live creature) short , we eventually realized the house was home to not just us, but bats as well.
It turns out that despite their amazing ability to keep the mosquito population under control, you really don't want bats in your house because a very high percentage of them carry rabies, and their bites are so small you may not even know you've been bitten. And, they don't even have to bite you to transmit it. They can just drool a bit while they're flying over you and get you that way. In short, you don't want your children sleeping in a bat-infested house. After a bat control expert spent several days sealing the house (quite a job considering this is a summer cabin that is quite open to the elements) and installing one-way exits, waiting for them to leave, and then closing the exits, we were finally free of bats.
It was only later on, when I mentioned all of this to the pediatrician, that she told me that any time a child may have been exposed to a bat they are given rabies shots as a precaution. They'd given shots to several kids that summer already. Ooops....
So I guess, so far, we've gotten lucky. Really, I think any time children actually reach adulthood without serious injury, there's a fair amount of good luck involved. You can try to increase your odds, but that's all you're doing. Just slightly adjusting the odds.
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