This time, two years ago. . .
A howl of pain shook the house mid morning. No, not a howl, a screaming moan. A mother’s ear is trained to know when one of their children is crying wolf and when he is truly hurt. No such training was needed here. I ran from the kitchen to the front door, baby Lewis on my hip, to find 7 year old Jude sitting on the porch rocking back and forth, intermittently shrieking, with his left foot so tightly clenched in both hands I was afraid he was the only thing keeping his toes attached to his foot. Had he chopped all his toes off? His whole foot? Did Zac leave the hatchet out in the yard? Is Jude going to be crippled for life? I can’t believe Zac left the hatchet in the yard! And he’s not home, I am, and now what?! What kind of dad leaves these things laying around with kids in the house?
A staggering number of thoughts can go through your head as you swoop to the ground and set a crawling baby beside you.
“Jude, Jude, Jude, what happened? Tell me what happened? What’s wrong with your foot?”
Communication is not Jude’s strong suit when he is in pain. Nor is receiving comfort. I tried to wrap my arm around him to move him. More scream moaning.
When I finally pried his hand away from his foot I found a 3 inch long splinter (at what length does a piece of wood stop being a splinter and become a pike or a spear?). . . A three inch long spear had punctured the soft flesh of the center of his foot and come out again on the other side. Blood was already oozing out and puddling under the skin in dark patches. I screamed for a brief moment with Jude and then did what I always do in moments of panic. Call Zac.
Only Zac was in a conference call. “Tami, I need Zac to come home right away, it’s an emergency.”
What would you think if your wife left that message with your secretary? Someone had been run over? Someone had just broken into your house? Someone had kidnapped one of the children? Someone had a really big splinter?
So of course Zac barreled out of his office, and ran the whole one block into the driveway of our white Victorian house, tumbling into the door to find me and Jude and baby Lew together on the floor.
“We have to take him to the emergency room! Do you want to go or should I?”
Fast forward to us not in the emergency room, but upstairs on Jude’s bed, I’m cradling him and wiping his face all wet with sweat and tears. Zac is assembling his tools, a leatherman, a needle, antiseptic and needle nosed pliers.
I suddenly feel like a Civil War field nurse. All we need is a saw for amputation.
Over the next tortuous minutes, I hold Jude down as tightly as I can while Zac first snips the long bloody end off the splinter and then proceeds to extract the rest of it from the meat of Jude’s foot. I can’t look, and instead hang on to Jude with all my might. This kid is getting strong. And I can’t help but realize the moans he makes sound just like the ones that I made bringing him into this world. And just like I did that night in January, here he is, trying to be brave, trying to get through this, knowing the pain will be over some time but not quite believing it will. I’m using all the strength I have to wrestle him into stillness and whisper in his ear that it’s going to be over soon. And then it is over, and Jude and I collapse in a heap, totally spent.
I go find the other three children under the care of Scooby Doo in the living room, make Judea comfortable place to convalesce with ice packs and lemonade and Zac, every competent Zac returns to work and assures his secretary, “No big deal, it’s OK, Jude had a really big splinter”.
