I used to love sushi.  Now I think it may be trying to do me in.  Well, not me personally.  My kids.  But as any mom knows, what hurts your kids hurts you. 

My kids aren’t exactly kids anymore.  They have their own lives…their own agendas.  On Mondays they eat sushi.  Not together, they run in different circles.  But yesterday, they both had plans to meet friends and eat sushi.

So I ask you…what are the odds that both of my kids would end up in the emergency room, for completely different circumstances, but on the same day they both ate sushi?  I’m pretty sure those are some amazing odds.  And believe me; if I had known I was going to beat the odds like never before, I would have bought a few lottery tickets. 

My daughter called me at four in the afternoon to tell me she had passed out.  She was a little spotty on the info.  She was dehydrated and hadn’t eaten all day.  At that hour of the day, her blood sugar was most likely dangerously low. Worse than that, she was cursed with her mother’s uncanny ability to find the disaster in any situation.  It took me hours to discover she had lost consciousness, falling violently into the sushi bar where she ricocheted off and fell backwards to crack her head on the floor. 

Like mother like daughter.

Imagine my surprise when she phoned me and said she was fine.  “No big deal, Mom.”

But several hours later, she had bruises all over and a frightening headache.  It was suddenly a very big deal after all.  So at one in the morning, we were driving to the hospital, forty-five minutes away.  The nursing staff was wonderful, I have no complaints at all, but it’s never fun to spend the wee hours of the morning waiting for CAT scans and X-rays. 

Not to mention, my son texting me all the while with an increasingly bad stomach ache.

I blamed the sushi…why not?  It was a factor in his sister’s fate after all.  He rejected my suggestion.  He was willing to defend his favorite sushi restaurant until the end.  But while I sat with my daughter in the emergency room, my son continued to text…his stomach pain getting progressively worse. 

By three-thirty am, my daughter was discharged and I was racing home to exchange the child with a head injury for the child with stomach pain. 

Did I mention it was pouring down rain and I can’t see to drive in the dark as is?  Right…a fun time was had by all.

The triage nurses were surprised to see me back, just an hour after bidding me farewell, and they  hurriedly escorted my son to a room where he was quickly hooked up to monitors, IV fluids, and  given a lovely dose of morphine.

His diagnosis?  Gall stones…or at least the very plausible possibility of such.  My son shot me an icy sideways glance as he realized this was a hereditary proclivity he got from me.  Luckily, morphine erased his annoyance right along with his pain and before long he was waxing philosophical about an episode of Law and Order.

While he rested comfortably in a hospital bed, I attempted to grab a moment’s rest in a plastic chair with a wall thermostat for a pillow. An impossible task in any situation, let alone my second trip to the ER in one night.

Several more hours later, reinforcements arrived to send me home.                          

After a quick pit-stop at the drug store to drop off a prescription, I was home…just in time for the sun to crest above the horizon, and the dogs to wake for their breakfast and first morning trip to the yard.  I flopped down on the bed sometime just before eight am, right about the same time my husband was rolling out of bed for work. 

Admittedly, I lay awake for more than an hour, convinced my husband would slip in the shower or choke on his vegan breakfast and I would be back in the car racing to the hospital yet again. 

He was fine.  No choking or broken bones.  And both of my kids will survive too.  Nothing more than a few bumps and bruises and a misbehaving gallbladder.

As for me?  I’m really tired.  More than normal.  The only saving grace was my months of practicing staying up all night long paid off.  I survived the morning too.  I may need to sleep tonight though.  Woman cannot live on chocolate alone!  Sometimes we need rest too.

Until the next time…I’ll be sleeping…leave a message at the beep.