hail to the sucker

thank goodness for suckers - not dumb people that get taken advantage of, but the age-old favorite, sweet sugar-loaded plastic-esque candies attached to a paper stick. One simple sucker saved the day today.

I wrote the following email to Spencer to describe our morning experience...


...In other news, Madeleine went in for a chest x-ray and it was seriously the most traumatic medical experience for me and her up to date. They had to put her in this ‘chamber’ of sorts that was a clear plastic tube that looked like the one in Willy Wonka where the fat kid gets sucked up and eventually stuck.


They tighten the tube around her so you can see the air pockets in her skin folds and her hands were straight up with her fingertips touching the top of the tube. They tighten it and then run away with her face towards the wall - talk about abandonment! It was so inhumane – it looked like it should have had leather straps or something as if it were a torture mechanism.


During the x-ray I had to stand across the room and I tried to talk to her through it all because otherwise she would have just bawled through the whole thing. She would cry two cries and then say in a sad, helpless voice “okay…” "tight..." or “stuck…” It was awful, she was trying SO hard to be brave and not just give it a good hard cry so she would repeat something I would say in between her cries. I totally started crying when they were doing it. She started crying out “mommy” “stuck” over and over and then gave up and just cried. It was so sad!


When they took her out of the contraption (the most polite/positive name for the thing) I noticed that they had her sitting on something that looked like a bicycle seat – hard plastic in that shape – but it was literally no bigger than my fist. Ugh! Like I said, it looked medieval, something you would find in a mad scientists lab. Terrible. I wish I had a camera to document the moment, but for now my three paragraph explanation will have to do. It really was torture – it made the two of us cry, enough said.


When we came out of the room I was in the waiting room getting her dressed and trying to calm her down. One of the technicians came out of the room and the best way to describe her reaction would be as though she was in a haunted house (you know those REALLY scary ones in Utah where the scary people follow you in the parking lot??) and one of those monsters was chasing her. She seriously FREAKED out and RAN away from me and the technician like her life depended on it. Traumatic.


No fears, I gave her a sucker that seemed to get rid of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder within 30 seconds. Whew!


Hope you're having a better day than we are! Love you.

______

I didn't bring a camera but grabbed this picture off the internet that shows the 'contraption'.

(how this child is so calm I will never know - maybe the leather straps in the back weren't tightened yet...)

This dated picture of Henry should give you an idea of what Madeleine's face looked like.

Henry's morning was a bit different...you can read about it here

(a BIG thank you to Melissa for watching/sheltering Henry from the traumatic experience!!)