Science Has Its Drawbacks
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Robert Frost
I was a high school English teacher for about 25 years. I love books, and writing, and philosophy, and stories of every kind. So, when seven of my eight children went into fields related to science, I was a little miffed. They all took classes like calculus, statistics, computer science, and human physiology. On top of that, they were careful never to ask me to help them with their homework. (I do admit that was a smart move on their parts, as I knew NOTHING about any of those subjects.) But as one child after another began to focus on science and math, it did set me to wondering what the genetic probabilities were for such a large percentage of my offspring to have inherited so few of my natural proclivities?
Son #3 was a typical example. From early on, he was an experiential learner: in order to understand something, you have to try it. Take the events of a single week when he was 10 months old. One morning he came crawling out from under my sewing machine table holding a half-eaten empty Styrofoam spool of thread. The rest of the spool was down this throat and all over his face. He was highly incensed when I tried to dig the whole mess out from between his two front teeth. But I was too late; he’d already swallowed a good deal of it. I called Poison Control. They assured me that he would have a couple of interesting diaper changes, but Styrofoam wasn’t toxic.
A couple of days later, he managed to rip the clear plastic window off an envelope containing a bill from his pediatrician. He ate that, too. Probably a response to his last well-baby visit when the doc alluded to him as a “concrete block” after the nurse weighed him. Poison Control was very patient when I called them a second time.
Only one day later, I found Son #3 sitting on the floor of Daughter #1’s bedroom enjoying a drink from the small bottle of stamp pad ink her friend had given her on her on her sixth birthday as part of a nifty make-it-yourself stationary kit. This time when I called Poison Control, the Pharmacist student manning the phone greeted me with, “Mrs. Voorhies, how’s Ben?” Even before caller ID, he’d recognized my voice—not someone I had ever imagined being that well acquainted with.
A credit to his advanced university training, the student informed me that stamp pad ink was on his “DO NOT DRINK’ list. Son #3 needed Ipecac. Fortunately, I was prepared for such a contingency, having read several books on what supplies a good mother needs to keep on hand in case of emergencies–or an onslaught of starvation, apparently.
Expecting Son #3 to resist the medical advice, I enlisted the help of my husband who sat on our bed and held the baby while I injected a dose of the Ipecac—truly repellent stuff. Perversely, Son #3 loved it. He swallowed it quite cheerfully. I guess his stomach had adapted to whatever happened to drop in because the medicine had no effect whatsoever. None. Now I called Poison Control a fourth time.
“Give him another dose,” was the order. We did. Fifteen minutes later—still nothing. (The good news was that Son #3 was probably wasn’t going to require any special menus down the road. He identified as a non-discriminatory eater.) What now? We sat the baby between us on our bed while we weighed out the options—give him the last dose of our Ipecac supply? Take him to the hospital to have his stomach pumped?
Son #3 seemed annoyed by the last option. Instead, he promptly projectile vomited the contents of his stomach, his intestines, his gall bladder and any other part of his body connected to his digestive system, covering both of us, our bed, the carpet, and the tail of the cat who had the misfortune to wander by. Good thing I wasn’t pregnant, or I might have contributed to the contamination!
Many years later, while Son #3 was doing clinical rotations in medical school, he told me he’d decided not to pursue becoming an OBGYN because there were just too many moist fluids involved.
Really? And he could have been a writer.