It was Wednesday, six days after I landed on my face over in Dorchester County, Maryland. I had been fighting a chest cold for almost a week at that point, and it had gotten progressively worse after the fall. Nurse Daughter Deborah had kept a check on my lungs, and that morning had said, “Mama, you are sounding tight. It isn’t pneumonia yet, but you should probably have something for bronchitis.” I had checked twice to make sure it wasn’t COVID (it wasn’t) but I didn’t like the sound of a bumble bee in my chest when I laid down. Besides, we were supposed to go to Ohio the next day for a high school reunion, as well as to catch up with family.
I tried to get an appointment, and actually had two appointments with my PCP that had gotten cancelled because he was out with COVID. I asked if he could call something in for me, but he was pretty sick and wasn’t able to get to it before we planned to leave. I decided to take a cough suppressant and go to lunch with my sisters. It’s something we seldom do, and it was last minute, but things came together, and I decided that I could make it.
I was on my way to the lunch gathering when Certain Man called and asked about my availability to run the steers into the back pasture as well as run some water for them in the watering trough back there. He sounded upset, and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. When I told him that I wasn’t home, he rather abruptly said that he would call one of the girls and see if one of them could do it for him. I said that I would be home before too long, but he seemed a upset and ended the conversation. It was puzzling, but I decided that he must be having a bad day at work and decided not to take it personally.
It was after 3:00 and I was home, but on a phone call when he came in. I said that I needed to get off, and that we were planning to leave in the morning for Ohio. I heard him mutter something about “We might have to see about that,” and thought that he was having second thoughts about taking me to Ohio with bronchitis. This bespoke an inflated evaluation of my importance because, this time, I had nothing to do with it!
I got off the phone and said, “What’s up, Sweetheart?”
He got serious right away. And a wee bit defensive. “I want you to look at something on my head. I think there is a toothpick in there.”
“ A what?!?!?!”
He looked at me like I should know. “A Toothpick!”
“What happened, Daniel? How in the world did you get a toothpick in your head???” I was sitting him down on the kitchen chair and looking at an abrasion on his scalp. It didn’t look catastrophic, but there was definitely something amiss.
The man was clearly unhappy. “Well,” he said a bit reluctantly. “You know how I keep two toothpicks in the header of my work car, just above the door. So today was so hot, and I had trash on the passenger’s side that I wanted to get out. So instead of climbing in and starting it, I leaned in, pushed the brake and started it so it could start cooling down. Then I grabbed the trash and ducked back out and both toothpicks went right into my scalp. The one was sticking out so I tried to pull it out. It was really stuck but I finally just grabbed it and yanked it out. There were no more sticking out that I could feel, so I looked up at the header and there was only a half of one up there still in the header, and a small piece on the floor. I couldn’t find the rest of it, so I figure it is still in there. I had ice water and a paper towel in my car, so I wet the towel and dabbed the spot. It hardly bled.” THEN it came out that it had happened at 11 o’clock in the morning. No wonder he wasn’t himself when he called me earlier in the day. This guy not only had finished all his inspections, but he had dropped by the Dairy Queen on his way home to pick up a Blizzard for one of the office birthdays. And he hadn’t told a soul. Nobody. It had been a long, hard day.
I gingerly felt over the area and got the shivers. It definitely had a ridge under the skin.
“Just pull it out,” he repeated numerous times. “Get a tweezers or something and pull it out!”
“Daniel, you need to go to urgent care! I can’t even see the end of it, and you need to have a professional get it out!”
Eldest Daughter was here and she was on it in a minute. “Dad! Listen to me! There is no way that we can get that out. You HAVE to go to urgent care.”
“For cryin’ out loud, it’s not that bad. Just take a razor blade and cut it out. If I could see it, I would do it myself!!! I am not going to go to Urgent Care!!!” He sat down on his LaZyBoy with a most determined look on his handsome face. I knew that look. I needed reinforcements. I called Nurse Daughter.
“Hey, Deb! Daddy got a toothpick in his head today, and he wants us to dig it out. Could you come over and look at it? He needs to go to Urgent Care!” This girlie knows her daddy pretty well, and she was immediately on the alert.
“I’ll be right there!” she said. And she was. She came breezing into the family room, and looked at the offending hole in his head, and the ridge beneath the skin and immediately said, “Dad! You need to go to urgent care. I’m pretty sure that they are going to lance that to get it out!”
“Just get a razor blade and cut it and take it out!” He reiterated. “Honestly! If I could see it I would do it myself! It’s just an old toothpick!” There was immediate loud, indignant objections from his two oldest daughters. Experience has taught me that in such situations, it is better to keep my mouth shut and stay out of the way, and let Daniel’s daughters handle things. But there came a time when I felt that I needed to interject some added fuel to their fire.
“Daniel, You might say that it’s ‘just’ a toothpick, but you had an uncle that died from ‘just a toothpick!’”
He snorted. The girls stopped mid-sentence.
“WHAT??? Mom, you never told us that! Who??? When??? How???”
“It was Grandma Sue’s oldest brother, Eli William. He lived alone and one day he ran a toothpick into his toe. I guess he thought it would be okay, but it wasn’t. Gangrene set in, and he got septic and died!!!
That did it! There was no more arguing. He was going, that was that, and I was so grateful – Until they started in on me!
“Listen, Mama! You need to go and get checked out for that bronchitis! If you are going to go to Ohio tomorrow, you need to at least make sure that it isn’t pneumonia!”
I was not interested in going. I was still badly bruised in my face, and a huge bruise had appeared on my right side and I knew that there would be all manner of inquiry and remonstrations and grave warnings and those piercing looks that make you feel like they really do think that your husband has been beating you, and I didn’t want to have it. But I hadn’t heard back from my PCP, and I was feeling a bit poorly, and they insisted, so I finally agreed to go. Our fair town of Milford has one of the best urgent care facilities I’ve ever been in (and probably the poorest Emergency Room connected to the local hospital that I’ve ever been associated with). So it was with a great deal of joy and confidence that Certain Man and I arrived at Urgent Care a little before 4:00. We both were promptly seen, and Daniel’s procedure was initiated without delay. Yep! There was still a toothpick between his scalp and his skull. Yep, they were going to hustle it right on out of there. Except they weren’t. The crazy thing was resistant to all the efforts to latch onto it and pull it out.
Finally the doctor said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Yutzy, but I cannot get this thing to budge. I’m going to have to lance it to get it out.” There was a spirit of good-natured camaraderie in the room, and Mr. Yutzy was past objecting.
“Go ahead,” he said, without rancor. “Go ahead and do what you have to do.” And so they made a small cut, grasped that sliver of toothpick and out it came!
What a relief! Two stitches later and he was ready to go home.
Except his wife was not. As predicted, they seemed to diagnose the bronchitis without any hesitation but beyond that, it was a crazy ride.
“We cannot treat two conditions at once, and you really need to have those bruises, especially the facial bruises, evaluated!”
“Do you feel safe at home?”
“You are on an aspirin a day, and you should always have an eval if you have a bad bump on your head.”
“When did you say this fall happened?”
“You really need to go over to the emergency room to have CT scans done. If you went there, you can have everything treated at once, but we cannot do those here!” It went on and on and on.
I finally said, “Look, I’ve lived in this body for a long, long time, and I’m not saying that nothing at all happened six days ago, but I am saying that I’m quite sure that nothing serious happened. I mean, I didn’t lose consciousness, I had no nausea following the fall, did not get sleepy, and there have been no intestinal or bladder changes. I’m quite sure that I’m fine! I wouldn’t mind having my ribs x-rayed since I’m having so much pain in my right side, but if you are x-raying my chest for pneumonia, won’t the rib be on there and couldn’t you tell if it’s something like that?”
They were unconvinced. Daniel was ready to go home and they still hadn’t done anything diagnostic on me except to listen to my lungs. Then Oldest Daughter, who had brought us in, decreed that she felt that I should be sent to the Emergency Room just for everyone’s peace of mind.
“Besides,” she said, pulling into her bag of tricks she uses to get me to do what she wants me to do, “If this was turned around and it was Daddy, what would you want him to do?”
Oh, Boogey-schnett! Okay then! I decided to go. Daniel took the car and went home, and Christina took me in her car to the ER. We pulled up to the entrance of the Emergency Room and my heart sank. It was wall to wall people. 4:30 on a Wednesday afternoon and it was packed out. Christina and I went through security and drug some chairs out of a corner and sat. And sat. and sat. We did stuff on our phones, we talked, we watched people and we waited. People watching was the best. There were people there who had been there since noon and were getting very unhappy and vocal about it. As the hours went on and on, I realized with a sinking heart that bronchitis and a 6-day-old injury had no precedence over almost everything else. I finally told Christina that she might as well go home and I would call her when I was ready to go home. Reluctantly, she took her leave and I was there by myself. My cough was such that I tried to stay away from other people, and my phone was running low on battery. By choice, I sat on the far side of the room, where I couldn’t see the television, but it was blaring on and on and on. As the hours passed, I became more and more uncomfortable with what I was hearing. It was Law and Order (?) and it was a dark and twisted episode involving a school teacher who molested little boys in the school restrooms, and I felt sick to my stomach and miserable. I was texting with Christina and she suggested I speak to the security guard and ask him if it was possible to have the channel changed. I was loathe to do it, but I finally decided that I should do something. I gathered my courage and approached the burly guard at the door.
“Excuse me,” I ventured in what sounded like a weak voice, “but can you tell me who decides what channel the television is tuned to? I’m really troubled by the content of this program, and wish it could be something else.”
“Of course, of course,” he said, acting like he agreed with me 100%. “I’ll change it right away!” And he did.
How was I supposed to know that the program was only five minutes from being over? How was I supposed to know that there were people engrossed in the plot and wanted to see the end? How was I supposed to know that the guard was friends with the most vocal of the watchers? My heart sank as exclamations were made and dark looks thrown in my direction. But I didn’t know. I watch almost no television, or I probably would have realized that the darkest, dankest, and dirtiest details are reserved for the final moments of a program, but I didn’t know. I only know that the longer I had sat there, the worse it had become, and I finally felt like I couldn’t take it anymore. I sank down into my chair and tried to be invisible. My phone was really dead now, and I had been there four hours with no end in sight.
Then Christina and Deborah conversed, and Deborah decided to come in and spend the rest of the evening with me. She brought me a phone charger (and lively, diverting conversation) and before we knew it, it was 10 o’clockish and they took me back to a room. My blood work came back pretty normal, the CT Scans came back clear, and yes, I did have acute bronchitis and they gave a prescription for an antibiotic and around 11:30, I was free to go home. Deborah dropped me off at the house where Certain Man was already sleeping, and I crawled in beside him, so thankful to be home.
There have been people who have voiced the opinion that I “must have been pretty mad about having to go to the ER and waiting such a long time only to have them tell me that my original assumptions were correct!” Honestly? I’m so glad that I went. Certain Man and I left the next morning for Ohio and I don’t know if it was the hours in the car, or what, but this Delaware Grammy was not only coughing and coughing, but there was a significant amount of pain in my right side pretty much continuously the whole trip. I felt really useless at Raph and Gina’s house because pretty much all I did was sit on a chair! If I hadn’t had a clear CT scan before I left, I probably would have asked Certain Man to take me to an ER somewhere along the way just to be sure that I hadn’t done something really bad to myself after all! Plus, I did get the antibiotic, and without it I probably would have ended up with pneumonia. This bronchitis is nothing to play around with. In fact, four weeks since the onset, I’m still coughing! I’m a lot better, but I’m really tired of this cough!
And that’s the story of A Toothpick and a Cough. I’m very grateful to be this far in the journey!
#myheartgivesgratefulpraise
Delaware Grammy 