Inherent Risks

It is 9:10 pm.

The foster cat is in heat. Her incessant yowls are bouncing off the walls, like an echo in the Grand Canyon.

It’s a school night.

Faven just went upstairs with a bottle of hair dye…blonde. (Don’t ask.)

Laurèn is in the bathroom filling up water balloons—to throw at the neighbors. (Yup!)

Yohannes just sat down to eat supper. (Gulp.)

I can’t really explain why I failed to make supper. But, let me try. At suppertime, a whole bunch of kids were riding their bikes over to Mac’s, and my kids were among them. Why go to the trouble of cooking, when:

A) No one was around,

B) their stomachs were going to be filled when they came back, and

C) the shining sun was so soothing.

My kids were thriving in the chaos of our community—all on our front lawn, and I did not want to interrupt what felt like the first day of summer. I too, was thriving, sitting on the front deck, with a tumbler of white wine sangria, sunshine on my face, surrounded by pages of hand-written and typed notes that may one day turn into a manuscript.

Ward is in Vancouver. When he is away, the crazies seem to climb out of the crevices of our body—and fling themselves about as if our skin is their trampoline.

This weekend, when Ward was in Red Deer, the wheels wobbled and then fell off. (He misses all the fun!)

Yohannes asked me if he could go to the park with one of his friends. I said yes, and went to my room to get dressed. Moments later, I heard a hacking, gagging kind of cough on the main floor. I leaned my head out the bedroom door, “Hey guys, who is coughing?” One of the girls answered, “It is Yohannes.” That's weird, I thought, he hasn't been sick. As I was putting my shirt on, he banged on my door. "Mom, mom,  mom..." he called, and coughed and sputtered like an old smoker. I quickly came out. 

“Buddy, what’s going on?” I said.

“ Well…” (cough, cough, cough) “You know the tennis rackets?”

“Yeah.” I answered and immediately started coughing myself. 

“Well,” he started and then his voice broke and croaked out. My alarm center immediately got flooded. “WHAT happened?”

“Umm… well…” (cough, hack, cough)

“Whatever, it was…” (cough, wheeze)  “…it is okay… (cough)  I just need to know what happened.”

“Well, the tennis rackets…”

“Yeah.”

“There was a black spray thing by the rackets, and I …ummm….pressed down…ummm, the trigger.”
Black spray thing? “Okay… And?”

“It was horrible—you can’t even breathe in the garage.”

I noticed that the girls, who were down the hallway, were now coughing. And I was particularly bothered, due to my asthma. I went to get my inhaler, opening windows along the way, and it suddenly dawned on me what had happened. I yelled back to Yohannes, “Oh no! The bear spray!”

I ran back to look at him and stared intently. He looked as he always looked, hair slightly disheveled, sheepish grin, dancing brown eyes. “Where did it spray?” I asked, gripping his shoulders.

“All over the place,” he answered.

He struggled to speak—coughing and gagging uncontrollably. Panic was setting in, and not really knowing what to do, I set up my inhaler for him to take a puff. I quickly explained that I would release the medicine into a clear spacer, and then he would take a slow breath and hold. He tried. Then, I told him to change all of his clothes. While he did that, I ran to the car and got the canister of Wet Wipes. My own irritated airways continued to wheeze, and I took another puff of ventolin. I carried the wipes upstairs and gave him two, and told him to wipe down all of his skin. I gave him another puff of ventolin, with a Benadryl chaser. 

Then, I left him standing in the bathroom with the wipes and ran downstairs to the computer. “My eye hurts,” he croaked. Worry sent me into hyper-speed. I quickly typed the following words into my search engine: I got sprayed with pepper spray, (624,000 matches, clearly we were not the first!). I immediately had a list of first aid options. I chose one randomly, and began to yell commands to him upstairs.  “Yohannes, do not touch the area that feels like it is burning….it can make it worse.”

“Okay,” he mumbled.

I scanned the rest of the document and ran back upstairs. I filled the sink with cold water, and put in some dish detergent. I got a cloth and told him to wipe down all of his skin with the cold dish soap water. Of course, he refused, because he had just wiped everything down with wet wipes. With gritted teeth, I told him he had to do it again. Ever curious, he wanted to know why we were using dish soap. “Because that is what the computer said to do to get the oil off your skin.”

“I didn’t put oil on my skin Mom,” he said.

“There is oil in the pepper spray.”

“Oh.” He started washing. “It feels like my skin is falling off.”

“Let me see… I don’t see anything. Where?”

“Right above my eye. It feels like it is burning.”

“Oh. I guess that is the pepper,” I said, “Did you get it in your eyes?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay, that is good.”

“Why?”

“Well, I think if it was in your eyes, we would have to go to the hospital and get your eyes flushed out  with saline.”

“What’s that?”

“Just salt and water.”

“Oh”… “Mom, what is wrong with my voice?”

“Well, it has gone into spasm.”

“What is that?”

“It just means that the muscles around your voice box are contracting…squeezing, and that makes it hard to talk.”

“Will it go away?”

“Yes it will.”

“What should I do now?”

“How about you just go sit outside in the front, and get some fresh air?”

He went outside and Faven came in and asked, “Is he going to die?”

“No, he is not going to die.”

“Is he going to be okay?”

“Yes, he is.”

As I cleaned up the bathroom, I tried to imagine how this had happened. Yohannes has insatiable curiosity, and a need to know NOW, kind of manner. When he was three years old, he had finished changing from his indoor shoes to his outdoor shoes in the coatroom at preschool. He started to follow me out the door and then at the last moment, he spied a bright red square on the wall, adjacent to the door. Right in the middle of that red square was a white handle that said, “Pull Down”. He couldn’t yet read, so at the same moment that he pulled he said, “Mom, what’s th…”

RINGGGG!!

He ran over to me, scared by the loud sound, as everyone in the area stared at us.

I kneeled down in front of him, the noise unbearably loud, and said, “That is the fire alarm. You only pull that when there is a fire. Come on.” I grabbed his hand as we headed down the hallway to the office to let them know that this was a false alarm. At the office they told us that the fire trucks were already on their way. As we were ushered outside, we could hear the high-pitched siren making it’s way toward us. Yohannes began to cry. I scooped him up, “It’s okay buddy; it was just a mistake.”

He sobbed, “Am I going to go to jail?”

“No, you are not going to go to jail." (Smile) "I think the fireman will just come and talk to you about what happened.”

Well, now he had discharged the pepper spray, which incidentally is a lot harder than the fire alarm. There is pepper spray from one end of our garage cupboard to the other—covering everything in its path with red-streaked oil. (It looks like a failed art project.) It is a waste of time for me to even ponder why he would have done it. My time would be much better spent pondering the parental decision to put it anywhere near to our sports gear. Sigh….

Curiosity did kill the cat, but I am very curious. Brittany Murphy