You Can’t Watch Them Too Closely

Kids are full of surprises.

They will amaze and amuse you, delight and astound you, and occasionally, they will bewilder and perplex you, overwhelm and even frighten you.

As a first-time father working as hard as I can to be the best dad possible, I’m learning new lessons every day, and some lessons are harder learned than others.

My mom passed away more than a decade ago — long before I ever had a child — but now that I’m a parent, I constantly hear her words in my head, words I heard her speak countless times over the years with regard to other parents and their children. Wise words. Words of experience.

“You can’t watch them too closely.”

I think about that all the time. It guides and informs nearly every neurotic decision I make in my day-to-day role as a parent.

Just over a week from today, my son will turn two-years-old.

It’s impossible to put into words how much I love and adore him.

He’s my little buddy, my sweetheart, my everything. I never wanted to be a daddy until I found out I was going to be his daddy, and since learning that, I’ve never wanted anything more.

And so, before last week, if anyone had accused me of not watching my child closely enough, I’d have had some very choice, highly child-unfriendly words for them. By anyone’s standards, I’d say that I watch him like a hawk — a highly protective daddy hawk. That’s me.

But one day last week, the admonition that “you can’t watch them too closely” was driven home for me in an utterly terrifying way.

Sixty seconds. Ninety seconds, tops.

That’s how long he was out of my sight.

Any parent of a small child will tell you that when kids are quiet, that’s when you should worry. If they’re moving about and making noise, you can use your keen powers of echolocation to pinpoint their whereabouts and ascertain what they’re up to.

He and I were playing in the bedroom. I left him long enough to walk to the kitchen for a drink of water, only to return to the bedroom and find him holding a bottle of Afrin Sinus Allergy nasal spray, upside down, childproof cap nowhere to be seen, and he was chewing on the bottom of the small plastic bottle.

Immediately, I grabbed it from him and noticed two things: the previously half-full bottle was empty, and the bottle itself was completely wet. Whether that was from his drool or the bottle contents, I had no way of knowing. I had to assume he ingested some of the fluid.

I quickly fumbled to get under a light bright enough to allow me to read the infinitely tiny print on the back of the container. Squinting as hard as I could to adjust my eyes to negative point-sized print, I saw the following warning:

Keep out of reach of children. If swallowed, seek medical help or contact a poison control center right away.

“Fuck!”

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK!”

Instantly, I called my wife at work, telling her what had happened and that she needed to get home as fast as possible. She wasted no time in flying out the door.

Then, I placed a call to poison control.

Their phone number is (800) 222–1222. Their website is poison.org.

If you’re a parent, or you take care of a child, I highly recommend adding both their phone number and website to your phone’s favorites. Seriously. Do it now if you haven’t already. Imploring you to be prepared is half of the reason I’m writing this.

The poison control specialist comes on the line and asks me what my son had gotten hold of. I told her it was Afrin Sinus Allergy nasal spray. She asked what was listed on the bottle as the active ingredient.

Once again, straining to read the fine print, I then found myself stumbling through nervously trying to pronounce “oxymetazoline hydrochloride.”

I was not prepared for what she’d say next.

“Okay, unfortunately, for children your son’s age that compound is lethal if ingested in even the smallest amounts. You need to get him to a hospital right away. How far are you from the nearest one?”

“FUCK! OH, FUCK! I don’t know? Twenty minutes?”

Poison control instructed me to get him to the hospital as quickly as I could, and that if my wife was five minutes away that was probably fine, but if it would be any longer, then I should call an ambulance.

We’re an Apple household, and we use the “Find My” app to track each other’s whereabouts when necessary. The app showed that she was approximately five minutes away.

I rushed around the house to gather the kid, his carseat, his diaper bag, some water should someone instruct us to give him water — I was just grabbing things as fast as I could, getting prepared to fly out the door the instant she pulled up. All of this time, however short it was, passed by a complete and total blur.

I flew down the stairs from our second-floor apartment with my son strapped into his carseat carrier and, within seconds, we were in the car and on our way.

I thought I broke every traffic law known to mankind when my wife went into labor and I rushed us to the hospital.

This time, I broke every traffic law known to mankind, as well as a few nobody even thought of yet, and I just may have broken the sound barrier, too. In what should have been a twenty-minute-plus drive with traffic — this was all happening at the height of rush hour, roughly 5:15pm — we arrived at the hospital approximately eight minutes later. I still don’t know how I did that.

Actually, yes I do — sitting in traffic, observing and obeying laws, stopping for stop signs and red lights, not driving on sidewalks to get around clueless drivers — all of that is for people who don’t have a potentially poisoned toddler in the back seat.

That’s how I did that. I drove it like I stole it; like a bat out of hell.

Poison control called ahead to the hospital so, thankfully, they were expecting us when I raced into their parking lot, screeching to a stop at the door to the ER. We were rushed inside, where they immediately took his vitals which, by the way, looked perfect. That was a good sign.

Then, because of non-vaccinated assholes with Covid who were flooding the ER taking up time, space, and resources, we had to wait for an available room. We were anxiously waiting, pacing, and observing our son to make sure his condition wasn’t changing for the worse.

I couldn’t say how long we waited — it felt like an eternity, but was probably thirty minutes — before we were whisked back to a room where we then had to hold him still enough for a nurse to stick electrodes all over his little chest for an ECG.

Here comes the understatement of the year: that wasn’t exactly easy.

After much struggle and comforting, he finally became still enough for them to obtain a reading.

It also looked good.

We were then transferred to yet another room for observation, and the entire time, he seemed perfectly fine aside from being freaked out at all that was going on around him. Poor baby.

Long story even longer, they observed him for a couple more hours, until they were sufficiently convinced that he had not, in fact, been poisoned. Eventually, they told us we could take him home, just to continue watching him closely for the remainder of the night, and to bring him back immediately if anything changed.

Fortunately for us, he must’ve spilled the contents of that bottle onto the carpet, but because I had no way of knowing whether he ingested any, I was right to panic, to contact poison control, and to rush him to the ER. I was also right to mix myself a very strong bourbon and coke when we got home that night, because I’d just lived through the worst fright I’d ever experienced.

I haven’t the words to convey how thankful I am that we were so fortunate. I also haven’t the words to convey how absolutely fucking terrified I was that something might happen to him.

We left the hospital desperately trying to feel some sense of relief, to which we clearly were entitled, though I cannot say that I was able to feel any semblance of that until the following day, despite mine and the bourbon’s best efforts.

When we got home, I started doing some research.

Did you know — in this country alone — that every eight minutes, a child is rushed to the hospital for potential poisoning? I didn’t know that.

Did you know that peak poisoning frequency occurs in children one to two years old? Neither did I, but it makes perfect sense.

Did you know that a potential poison exposure is reported to poison control every fifteen seconds, and that human exposure accounts for more than two million calls to poison control each year? Well, then we both just learned something new.

The realization that we are somehow statistically average was in no way comforting or reassuring. Despite assurances to the contrary from both my wife and hospital staff, I felt like a failure; like I had almost allowed an accident to happen, one which possibly threatened my son’s life. Were something terrible to happen to him, I would not be able to survive that.

However, in the days since this happened, I’ve slowly come to realize that being statistically average in this case, only means that I am human. Damn it.

I am a good father. Deep down, I know this.

I do watch him closely. I am constantly paying attention to him, watching out for him, anticipating his next move before he makes it.

I theorize and strategize to accommodate for both the expected and the unexpected, but despite the most watchful parent’s best efforts, sometimes accidents still happen. We do our best to avoid calamity whenever possible, quickly becoming experts in damage control and catastrophe prevention — that’s our job as parents — to keep our children safe.

Still, at the end of the day, my mom’s warning holds truer than ever — and sharing this advice is the other half of the reason I wrote this piece in the first place — because I want other parents or child caregivers out there to remember this one simple thing.

You can’t watch them too closely.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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