Mother Instinct

Being a mom is great, but it comes with responsibilities that are sometimes not to my liking. One of them is taking care of barf and boo-boos. I am married to a medic, and believe me, that comes in handy usually. But when in medic mode, Hero Guy treats the wee ones like every other patient and sometimes mother instinct just takes over and I have to step in. Now this is difficult for me since I have always been a bit squeamish. From the earliest time when people would ask "So, are you going to be a nurse like your mom?" I would emphatically decline. I am a medical transcriptionist and you can regularly see me typing along with a knot in my stomach, a look of disgust on my face as I listen to the details of some unfortunate patient having their ingrown toenail removed. It is hard enough for me to listen to it described, and I certainly won't sign up to actually view it in progress.

Thus, when Little Chic crashed on her scooter in the last hour of our camping trip, I readily volunteered Hero Guy to bandage her up. But when it came time to remove the bandage, we discovered that it had been left on too long, and the gauze was firmly implanted in the dried-up goo that had oozed from Little Chic's wound. Hero Guy began soaking the gauze and at the point he realized it was not going to come off easily, he described the painful process Little Chic would have to endure to get it off, and she began to howl. His method is quick and simple, do what you have to do and just get it done. My sympathy began flowing in full tilt and I intervened to say that I would remove it slowly and as painlessly as possible.

Hero Guy let me take over, but disapproved of my Qtip, water and two-hour method versus his bite-the-bullet and rip it off. I will have to say that I think Little Chic cried a lot more while I was doing it since it stretched into such a long process and she still went to bed traumatized. Her tolerance for pain and grossness is about like mine, so it probably would have been better to take the short version and get it over with.

However, this morning, she is in fine form, we both have dried our tears and Hero Guy did say he admired my patience. And we will not be asking him to put another bandage on it either.