If you read my first post on this blog you'll probably already guess that the wrappers involved Emma, our youngest child. I think she was probably about three years old at the time.
That evening was uneventful for the most part. Lorraine and I had gone out for dinner, or a movie or something like that to escape from they mayhem at home. We arrived home around 10:00 to a living room full of kids watching TV (probably something they weren't supposed to be watching which quickly took a back seat given the situation). We immediately noticed several Children's Tylenol wrappers on the floor. We interrogated each of the seven kids that were awake (no waterboarding was involved) and each denied opening the packages. The two remaining culprits were Daisy, our Newfoundland, and Emma, the three year old.
Using my best deductive skills acquired by watching Basil Rathbone in Sherlock Holmes movies as a kid I noticed that the packages were not chewed open as would be expected if the dog got into the box. Heck, I'm an adult and I sometimes have to chew them open because that tidy little corner that you're supposed to peel back won't. Instead, each foil pack was nicely peeled back. Somebody far more skilled than I had opened them and it wasn't Daisy. That left Emma.
Knowing that excess doses of Tylenol can cause liver damage and/or be fatal, we woke Emma to question her (using UN allowable interrogation techniques). She wasn't in the mode to be awaken which caused even further concern. More accurately, she was pissed and wouldn't even answer our questions initially. We were persistent though and she finally admitted...she had not taken the Tylenol and promptly went back to sleep.
We were faced with a dilemma. None of the kids admitted to opening and/or consuming the Tylenol and the dog still wasn't talking. Do we assume that Emma took them or do we assume that some nefarious child opened them, one by one, and fed them to the dog that she didn't like. More on that theory later.
I called poison control and gave them the quantity, 19 pills, and Emma's weight, about 22#. They said that that dose would be lethal and to get her to an ER immediately. They asked where we would take her and we told them Blank Children's Hospital. They said they'd call ahead and let them know we were coming in. Keep in mind that Emma is showing no signs whatsoever of poisoning other than wanting to sleep which is pretty normal for a three year old at 10:30 p.m. Nonetheless, we weren't taking any chances. We'd take Emma to the ER knowing that if one of the other kids was lying about taking them, they'd begin to show symptoms soon enough.
We walked into the ER and told them who we were. We immediately heard over the PA system, "code yellow" and Emma's name was called. I'll digress breifly here and share with you that my sister recently had outpatient surgery at Rush Presbyterian Hospital and experience chest pains post-op. They wheeled her over to the ER who told them it would be a six hour wait. God bless the folks at Blank!
The triage nurse asked a few questions about dosage, number of pill, time the pills were consumed, etc. They weighed her, measured her and took her blood pressure. All normal by the way. We were then walked back into the exam room area and installed in a room. Keep in mind that nobody, and I mean nobody, was yet interested in who was going to pay for this. Their focus was on caring for Emma.
A paramedic came into the room and asked some more questions and did a great job interacting with Emma. He got Emma set up to watch a video on the TV mounted in the ceiling so the child can lay back on the table and look straight up at the TV. She wanted to watch Strawberry Shortcake. It wasn't too long after they got Emma set up to watch videos when a lady came in pushing a cart with a laptop on it to gather our personal and insurance information. A very streamlined process to say the least.
Shortly after sharing our insurance information the Dr. came in. A few more questions followed. She said that, based upon the time that the Tylenol was consumed we'd have to wait for it to be metabolized into Emma's system in order for it to be detected. We had a fairly narrow window of when we suspected she ate the Tylenol and it was decided that they'd wait about an hour before drawing blood. It was already 11:00 p.m. and a bit of a wait.
This is a pediactric ER so they know what they're doing. They let me and Emma head down to the toy closet for her to pick out stuff to play with. With only one or two other patients in the ER at that time of night so there was no competition for the toys. We played in the toy room a little while and then took a few toys back to her exam room to wait for the blood test. Emma was wide awake and raring to go at this point. She was having fun playing with toys, watching TV and wondering why we didn't go to the ER more often.
Then the time came for the paramedic to draw some blood. Emma was nervous but handled it very well. A needle prick was a small price to pay to have sole access to somebody else's toy closet and unlilmited access to videos. With the blood drawn it was another wait for the results.
About 45 minutes later the Dr. came in to let us know there's no indication that Emma had consumed any Tylenol. It's now almost 1:00 a.m. and time to head home to wonder further who the culprit was behind the missing 19 Childrens' Tylenol.
When we got home everyone was in bed except for Emma, Mom and Dad who were now pretty tired. We put Emma to bed and then went to bed ourselves.
Knowing we had a happy ending to this adventure we got up in the morning to find that Daisy (remember Daisy from the beginning of this post) was vomiting. Now, you need to understand that this dog elicited different emotions from different members of the household. She was a rescue that we took in a few months earlier. For a Newfoundland she was quite small due to being nutritionally abused (at least that's what I'd call it) as a puppy. Due to indequate calories growing up her growth was stunted. While small for a Newfoundland she still topped the scales at about 120#.
Daisy was a very quiet, gentle but insecure dog who followed Lorraine everywhere and would have been glad to show any burglar around the house. While Lorraine really liked Daisy and I was neutral with no real attachment to her, she was reviled by some of the kids. Dani, 18 years old at the time of the Emma ER trip, was most vocal about disliking the dog. There were suggestions of feeding the dog chocolate or locking her outside or some other cruel and usual punishment that nobody ever acted upon. When confronted with our theory, Dani adamantly denied feeding the Tylenol to the dog. Yet, there we were, cleaning up dog puke for three days after the event. And, remember, using my analytical, steel, trap-like mind I'd deduced that the individual Tylenol packets had not been chewed open. Unless, of course, I totally underestimated the skills of this dog to open 19 packets without leaving a single tooth or claw mark.
To this day Dani and all of the other kids deny eating the Tylenol or feeding them to the dog. It will take more than the wisdom of Solomon and the deductive skills of Columbo to figure that one out. Then again, maybe some day we'll be having one of those holiday dinners when all of the grown kids come over to our house with their kids and a conversation starts with "...do you remember when..." and the truth will come out.
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