Poison Control Poster Child Training Unit 1

Nine-year-old boys are doomed by their curiosity. I know a lot of nine-year-old boys and they're all lucky to be alive. I thank god every day for their obsession with video games because it turns them into mindless, sedentary zombies--and it keeps them off the street and away from the power tools.

But sometimes it gets away from them and their curiosity makes them do something so irreversibly stupid that they lose an arm or worse. This kind of behavior is usually preceded by a question, either to themselves or a friend who is egging them on, something along the lines of "What does this thing do?" and thwack: meet Stumpy.

So I'm at the kitchen table writing, which involves, believe it or not, an ungodly and tedious amount of staring into space, when I notice my son is examining a mint. It's one of those highly technical mints where a hard, chalky candy is welded seamlessly to a translucent gel mint. It has a demarcation which Connor has discovered and he's decided to find out what's inside the thing by prying the two halves asunder and what he finds is that the gel, cinnamon flavored, is pressurized and the oil of cinnamon has exploded from inside the gel and taken up residence in his eye socket which has, as I look up, welded itself shut.

But I didn't see any of that happen. Though it occurred directly across the table from me, I was writing and, so , oblivious to anything other than the fine and specialized fiction which I labor to produce. All I saw was my son calmly holding his hands to his eyes. So I ask him, calmly, what's the matter?

Now, I don't get upset. I get annpyed. If a kid saws him arm off, though he may do irreversible damage to himself, the real problem is that he's ruined my day. Now I gotta do first aid, clean up the blood, do something with the arm, call 911. It's an inglorious pain in the ass and just pisses me off. And, really, most accidents and traumatic events are way overblown. Most things are on the splinter-in-the-finger varietal and should not intrude on the well deserved quiet afternoon of an adult. So I don't go looking for problems. I don't jump up from the chair when something crashes; I don't put down my magazine right away when a kid comes in with a nosebleed; and I never, ever, ask "what's wrong?" I don't want to know. So when my wife sees me rising gently from my chair, she explodes.

I see Connor hunch a little harder and a wail unwinds from somewhere deep in his knees. It comes out of his mouth shoots through the ceiling like a missile and explodes over our house, shaking the roof beams, and curling the floorboards up and Connor, suddenly lost in a plume of hurt, screams:

"My eyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyes!"

Colleen hits the dining room in full charge. She swoops Connor up, throws me the phone, and yells: POISON CONTROL! The way someone might yell "GRENADE!" and pushes her son into shower turns his face into a full stream of ice cold water and Clockwork Oranges his eyes wide open while he screams.

Poison Control tells me we're doing the right thing, that cinnamon oil is unlikely to cause any real damage and ought to stop hurting in about 15 minutes and maybe I ought to try a piece of bread. So I take a piece of bread into the shower with my son still bawling and Col tries to stick it on his eye to sponge up the oil but it dissolves.

Connor is sobbing and yelling that he's blinded himself, asking Colleen if he'll ever see again and Colleen of course runs all the scenarios through her mental actuarial tables, her ephemeris of disaster, and yells at me to ask poison control about it and the woman from poison control is trying to reassure me and says that really, such a small amount of the material won't cause permanent damage and I can call her back in an hour and let her know how things went.

So everything gets better all of a sudden. Connor stops crying. He and Colleen emerge in a heap of damp towels, fully clothed, wild haired and red eyed and slightly addled like they just washed up from a shipwreck.