Tonight I shall tell a bone-rattling tale of Festivus MIRACULOUSNESS!
(For an introduction to Festivus, scroll to the bottom of this post.)
Tuesday evening was chill and damp. After work, I went shopping – because toilet paper and diaper supplies were low, and not having personal heigene products quells the holiday spirit, does it not?
Upon arriving at the ground floor of my apartment building, I saw a young man, one of my neighbors, who never, ever talks to me.
This night he approached me, hesitantly at first, and said (not Happy Holidays, but): “Don’t you live on the third floor? Well, an ambulance took your wife and baby daughter to the HOSPITAL! Your daughter was HURT! There was a lot of BLOOD! Your baby was CRYING! They left about thirty or forty-five MINUTES ago! I don’t know anything ELSE, except that an INDIAN lady is up in your apartment with your other KIDS!”
Well, I didn’t panic. After a few fruitless questions, I thanked the young gentleman and hurried upstairs, with a sick feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach which only a parent can know.
“The Indian lady” must be our friend and neighbor from the next building, the mother of a girl that my children play with. The mother’s English is flawless – all thirty or forty words of it. (Michelle has always been better able to understand her than I.)
There she stood, pensive. My two elder daughters bobbed, ran back and forth, climbed up and down on the sofa, took turns exitedly hugging me, and talked over one another, saying such helpful and informative things as: “Daddy, Saadia got hurt!” “There was blood EVERYwhere!” “Saadia hurt her hand and there was a lot of blood!” “Saadia was crying!” “Mommy was crying!” “We were all crying!” “Two men came and took them to the hospital!” “Saadia hurt her hand in the door and it was bleeding!” “We’ll show you!”
They guided me down the hall, as my gaze roamed up and down and over the walls, and along the carpet for streaks and pools of blood that never materialized. They showed me their bedroom door, and somehow I was made to understand the my precious baby girl had been trying to follow her older sisters into their bedroom, and one of them had shut the door with her finger in it.
Our Indian friend explained that her husband had accompanied Michelle and the baby to the hospital. She dialed his mobile phone number. He explained to me that the baby was all right. He gave me a room number, assured me that everything was under control, that I should come to the hopital but not rush, and that his wife would be happy to continue watching over my children, and I hung up.
I told the children that I would be going to the hospital. Our Indian benefactress asked me if I could drive - I supposed she was asking if I was calm enough to drive, so I answered in the affirmative. She asked me if I needed a Coke before I left. (I thought this was odd, but it later occured to me that “Coke” might have been the only word for “drink” that she could think of.) Reaching some sort of judgment, she gestured for the children to stay and asked me into the kitchen.
She opened the freezer and took out a plastic sandwich bag. In it were two cubes of ice. And the tip of my baby’s finger.
Twenty minutes later, I held the bag up for inspection at the front desk of the hospital and was given instant admittance. (It had occured to me to wonder, however, why the EMT’s had not found the fingertip when they were there. More about this later.)
I found Michelle, Saadia, and our other Indian friend without trouble. There was a moderate amount of blood – a lot, I suppose, for a sixteen-month-old child. It was on Michelle’s shirt and down her arm, with odd splatters on her pants. Blood was on Saadia’s clothing, too, and they both had smears of blood on their faces, just for dramatic effect. What I’m trying to say is, there really was a terrific volume of blood, when you consider the source.
I was able to see for myself where the tip of the ring finger of Saadia’s left hand had been nipped right off. Blood still welled prodigiously from the open end.
I waved down a nurse and gave her the bit that had been left behind. She seemed sceptical that the doctor would be able to re-attach it, saying that it looked like “more of an evulsion than an amputation.” She nevertheless put it carefully in a container for safekeeping.
Shortly thereafter, Michelle and Saadia were taken away to X-ray. Someone from the billing department came and verified our address. I was asked which parent was the decision-maker, and which one was the spokesperson. Michelle is in charge of the medical records and insurance information for the family, and she sets the appointments for vaccinations and check-ups, etc; so, in her absence, I decided to name her “decision-maker” for the family, and I was named “spokesperson.” This was a source of much amusement for my Indian friend.
Michelle and Saadia came back and we waited for hours. But, the surprises were not yet over! A nurse explained to us that one of the EMT’s that had been to my apartment had reported (among other things) that one of my other daughters had a black eye. As a result, we were told, the hospital staff was legally obliged to contact child social services, and there would be an investigation into our fitness as parents.
Now, days after the event, Michelle says she understands things that were said and done by the EMT that baffled her at a time in which she was concerned only with the welfare of her bleeding, crying baby. For now, I will only say that the asshole should have had more competence than to mistake a birthmark for a black eye. He should have attended to the emergency at hand, rather than indulging his own prejudices and launching a private investigation into our supposed abuses. While the man occupied himself for several minutes snooping around our sparsely-appointed apartment, he spent such little effort attending to the accident that he failed to notice Saadia’s fingertip still stuck to the edge of the door where it was removed. I may elaborate on his crass, unprofessional behavior in another post.
That matter caused, I think, a delay in Saadia’s treatment, because a small strike force of professionals had been gathered, and immediately after the nurse informed us of the EMT’s allegations of abuse, they swarmed down on us to ask us leading questions and observe our reactions. In a few short minutes they were satisfied, the team evaporated, and we were left to wait some other indefinite amount of time.
FINALLY, one of the nurses returned. She told us that there was a surgeon who was on his way. She apologized profusely about having to report us to child social services. She told us that no one at the hospital had seen anything that would lead them to suspect us of any kind of misconduct – to the contrary, we seemed like an ordinary, loving couple! Although they were legally required to pass our information on to social services, they included a statement in their report, saying in effect that they saw no behaviour on our part to support the charges.
She was excoriated by my Indian friend, who told her, half-jokingly, that he was going to come back the next day with his infant son, since they had forgotten to document the birthmark on his son’s arm, and he wanted to avoid the hassle of having child welfare investigate him later.
Finally, the surgeon arrived. He told us that he would indeed sew the fingertip back on, for several reasons: first, if he didn’t use the fingertip, he would have to take a graft from somewhere else on her body to cover the area; second, since young children have fantastic recuperative powers, there was a chance that the fingertip would actually “take” and heal perfectly; and third, there was quite a bit of nail with the fingertip, and while the nail was not actually alive, it could be sewn back on with everything else, which would hold the nail bed open, without which the nail would not grow back properly.
So, about six hours after her arrival, Saadia’s fingertip was restored to its rightful place, after which Saadia’s hand was wrapped up thoroughly, like a little boxing glove.
Then we waited another hour for discharge papers and a perscription for antibiotics.
Then, after getting home, I had to go back out for the antibiotics. Then, a few hours sleep. Then, up in the morning to retrieve my daughters (they had spent the night at the home of our Indian friends.) Then I went to work.
Wait a minute! What, you may ask, is the Festivus Miracle? Why, it’s the fact that I didn’t hunt down that EMT and do something I later would have regretted.
Did I mention that my dad had two car accidents in the past week and a half? And that in one of them, he was driving my car?
An introduction to Festivus, for the uninitiated:
Posted in family life, humor, parenting, snaars offspring | Tagged amputation, Festivus | 3 Comments »
Well snaars fans, this is where I uncomfortably concede to myself that my philosophy education has had little direct relevance to anything I have done since receiving my degree. “Direct relevance,” I say - I do not say “no relevance.”
Other disciplines claim to be paths to wisdom. So what makes philosophy different from other ways of knowing or understanding— like science, or religion? 
A simple answer (by way of introduction) is that philosophy has much in common with science and religion— but it is more closely related to science.
The methods of science include the use of careful observation and reasoning. Philosophy, in contrast, relies heavily on the use of reason alone, and less on empirical observation. Scientists and philosophers alike presuppose that there are answers to the questions they ask.
