Terrible Wreck

"Mom! Let me in!" Emery screamed outside my bathroom door.
"I'm not dressed," I explained.
"It doesn't matter!"
Sensing the distress of the situation, I left the water in the shower running, dripped across the bathroom to my robe, and quickly put it on. When I opened the door, a blond-headed, red-faced girl howled in my direction.
"Did someone hurt you?" I asked, alarmed. "Did you break something? Are you scared?"
"Worse!" And she shoved her foot into my face. It will never cease to amaze me how a child, when scared, can contort their body into a multitude of gymnastic shapes in order to bring attention to the injured part. But what I saw left me woozy.
"Your toe is all bloody," I yelled, because I'm good at deducing things.
"I was climbing the apple tree, and I reached for a really big apple, but I fell, and when I was falling down the tree a piece of bark slid between my skin and my toenail."
"Eww," I muttered as the darkness closed in around me and my knees turned to jello. "We'll have to get tweezers and pull it out."
"You can't," she cried. "It's not a solid piece of wood. It's all soft and when you pull on it, it just crumbles."
So I carried her, in my soaking wet robe, to the kitchen and put her foot in the sink. After soaking it in water long enough for my scalp to stop tingling, I told her to bite into an apple really hard as a distraction while I tried using a needle to pry the chunk of bark out from under her toenail. Alas, the child spoke truly when she said that the bark just crumbled. The needle was totally ineffective. Then I placed the poor girl into a bath hoping the warm water would eventually disintegrate the wood. The only thing that course of action succeeded in doing was to irritate the poison sumac rash that covered her body.  Finally, I attempted to use a needle to scrape the crumbly substance out of my daughter's nail bed. That action induced screaming likely to cause deafness in our neighbors. She bit my brush in half and screamed so loudly I expected my eardrum to climb out of my body and run away.


We spent the rest of the evening in the ER where she brought the nurses to tears with her sad face. They rushed to give her ice, Advil, a pillow, a pony. That is when I decided to take her with me every time I have to wait for endless hours.

The doctor finally numbed her toe and dug out all the bark with special tweezers only doctors are allowed to play with.

Then Emery's phone buzzed. She had a text from a friend asking how she was doing. Without even a slight pause, Emery responded, "I am a terrible wreck."

I looked at her laying on the paper-coated table with a nasty rash all over her body from poison sumac, a horrifying big toe,  tears running down her blotchy, red face, and I agreed with her diagnostic.

But she's my sweet, little, terrible wreck.