Laxative Shooter

I heard my wife swear in a nearby room. That’s not unusual. But in this instance, I believed my three darling daughters to be in the room with her. That made it strange. We try to temper our tongues around our offspring.

 

My wife was holding a small empty vial when I entered the room. She was interrogating our two year old. “Where did you get this? Was it empty when you found it? Did you drink it? What the fuck?”

 

The adorable little tyke assured her mother that she had most definitely imbibed the entire dose of liquid laxative suppository.

 

Mrs. Snuphy swore again.

 

We quickly located the source of the cocktail. The kid had stood on a package of diapers (I think) so that she could reach into a drawer full of kiddy maintenance gear, all of it seemingly benign with the exception of the one item she drank.

 

We scoured the laxative’s packaging in search of product warnings for “accidental” ingestion scenarios. As expected of any product intended to be stuffed on one’s ass, it was highly recommended that physician be consulted.

 

Now I swore.

 

But not being prone to panic, we decided to first consult our regular family doctor: google. Dr. Google concurred repeatedly. Call a physician.

 

Mrs. swore, then she dialed our pediatrician. Or to be more specific, she called our ped’s call service. Soon after the call connected, my lovely wife place her hand over the phone’s microphone, swore again, then informed me that having the doc paged would cost us $20. We held a short debate to determine if this particular child was worth the cash outlay. We concluded she was, and that were willing to go as high as $30, but probably not $40.

 

The doc called within the following 3 minutes. The call lasted less than two minutes. He had no idea if drinking butt laxative was harmful, or if we should be inducing vomiting, flushing her with water, force feeding her mustard, or driving her to the ER. He took $20, said “beats the crap out of me, call someone else”

 

Both of us swore.

 

Mrs. Snuphy then called the national poison control center. I listened to her explain our predicament. There was a brief period of silence. Then I heard something I hadn’t expected: laughter. My wife had a good giggle, then began a witty exchange with poison control riddled with more giggling. It was then I understood there was not a need to rush to the hospital, that our credibility as parents would not (yet) be tarnished, and that the folks who know about poison have a sense of humor.

 

Poison control had predicted that doing an oral shooter of anal boom boom juice as not likely to do our child any harm. They also predicted the substance would work on my kid’s entire digestive system to make her extra regular.

 

They were right. Twenty minutes later, she completely emptied, then asked for a bowl of cheerios.

 

She was ok, even though her traumatized parents were not.