Every parent knows this to be a reality of parenthood because children are often the catalyst for the unexpected. One trip to the ER was because my six-year-old daughter had slammed my son’s fingers in the door for the fourth overall time: once for every year of his life as he was four at that point.
These trips were made even more memorable whenever the attending physician required x-rays. My son’s sensory input issues would manifest at a seemingly exponential rate, making the trip much more nightmarish. Not only would he scream and kick and fight, we would all end up with radiation exposure and the x-ray films would end up inconclusive.
When he was four and quickly approaching his fifth birthday, we were able to reason with him more. His fascination with robots and the like enabled us to describe most “scary looking” medical equipment as such to help him deal with his anxiety, thus the x-ray machine became a giant robot. The x-ray technician was very helpful and realized the machine would make a noise that may prove unnerving for my son so he activated the machine while everyone was behind the protective wall to see what his reaction would be. When the x-ray machine made it’s operating noise (kind of like a warble), it bothered my son enough for the creation of another explanation: the robot is just talking (kudos to my wife).
“Do you hear it talking?” My wife asked him.
“Yes!” He answered her after some consideration. “OK ROBOT! I’LL BE RIGHT THERE!” He yelled to the x-ray machine from behind the wall.
It was the first time we were able to obtain definitive x-rays of my son in any capacity. We were fortunate to have such an accommodating x-ray technician, who allowed my son to view the results. These proved to be the most powerful images of my son’s young life: he was the proud owner of a skeleton hand! By sheer coincidence, he had been learning about human bones and our general skeletal makeup in school, and these images made it more real for him than any school lesson ever could.
He was excited beyond containment. He tried to match his hand position perfectly by placing it on top of the screen displaying the digital x-rays, rotating his hand as needed for alignment. It was all he spoke about the rest of the time we were in the ER. It was all he spoke about on the hour-long trip home. It was all he spoke about until he fell asleep that night. He may have even dreamed about his skeleton hand — who knows?!
The next day at school, he couldn’t stop shoving his hand in everyone’s faces and explaining how he has a skeleton hand. The x-rays were conclusive and (thankfully) he didn’t have a broken finger — but that was entirely secondary to my son and his skeleton hand. He was a proud owner.
