Mama Mia!! Here I go again...

Okay, I have Mama Mia on the mind because I finally got to see the movie last night over at my BFF Carrie's house and so now I know what all the singing and dancing is all about - such a great movie!!!!! But the other reason for the title is because of how I spent the first part of the weekend...my dear son, Cord, who made his first visit to the emergency room two days after he turned two years old, to get two stitches in his forehead after falling at my mother's back porch, decided that he needed to fit an ER visit in before he turned four next month. So we're actually going to get to bed on time Thursday night and we almost had everyone in bed by 9:00, but as I am getting our glass of ice water to take to bed, Chad and Cord come rushing in to the kitchen and Chad is saying we're going to have to take Cord to the Emergency Room...because he has a rock up his nose! Great...we try to get him to blow it out - no luck; we try to lay him back and look up his nose - we can't see ANYTHING. But, he continues to tell us that it's there, it's up there, he can feel it. We make a couple of phone calls (to our resident nurse, also a great friend) and she calls the ER in Childress to ask their opinion. Everyone agrees that we should probably go ahead and take him in before his nose tissues begin to swell around the rock and it gets further inbedded. We wrap up twin sister, Aidan and take her to the grandparents, and head off to Childress with blanket-wrapped pajama boy. Once at the ER, Cord is wide awake, not in any pain and now has decided that the rock is on the OTHER side of his nose. I'm beginning to think he is not being honest about the whole thing. The doctor on call that night examines him and can see no rock. He tries blowing it out, again with no results...so he calls in the x-ray machine. After two x-rays, it's decided that they can't really tell for sure if there is a rock present, so he says we need to do a cat scan. Okay...here's my "horrible" mom admission...all I could think was - great here's an expensive procedure and there probably isn't even a rock up there, but thankfully my husband insisted because he was pretty sure that there was a rock, and so off we go to the cat scan room. Being a science teacher, I'm always fascinated with this whole process, so even though it was my son, I thought it was really cool (and the bonus was I got to see a preview of his permanent teeth and they look like they'll be straight - YES!!!). OH, and by the way, the rock WAS there...in all it's 1.1 by .6 cm size!! It was lodged to the left side of the nasal septum right under the nasal bone, but too deep to just blow out. So the next order of business was to call an ear, nose and throat doctor in Amarillo and see how fast we needed to get him to a specialist to remove it. The doctor on call for Dr. Morgan (who we actually had visited while living in Amarillo and loved) said just to call her office in the morning and see when she could look at it. So we trooped back home and went to bed (at 1:00 a.m.) and then got up the next morning to make the trek to Amarillo. After making arrangements with Dr. Morgan's office to be "worked" in and knowing we might have to wait all day, we made other arrangements for Sissy and both of our jobs and headed north. We got to the doctor's about 12:40 and only had to wait about an hour and a half. It only took Dr. Morgan about 20 minutes to "suck" the rock into view and pop it out with a very skinny "crochet" needle. It wasn't near as traumatic as we thought it would be and I'm sure it was a fairly routine procedure for them. They did have to give Cord "laughing gas" (nitrous oxide) and he was loopy and silly. He never cried, whimpered, or jerked at all while they were doing the procedure. For that matter, he was good as gold for every bit of the ordeal (x-rays, cat scans, nasal probes, nasal picks, etc.). I think a lot of that had to do with his affinity for dark-haired girls. He proclaimed his love for the radiologist in Childress Dr. Jenks, and told that "sweet lady" that he wanted to marry her. Dr. Morgan and her nurse were also dark-haired and sweet talking and he was all smiles and sweetness himself. So alls well, that ends well and we have "the rock" to show for our little probably $500-$600 adventure. We can laugh about it now, until the bills come in!! So one trip to the ER when he was two, one when he was three, and we'll pray that he doesn't make a habit of this. Mama Mia!