Trip to Emergency Room Bends Rules of the Road

Within the realm of driving experiences, the trip to the emergency room has got to be the worst. For most of us, it’s as close to extreme driving--the type that usually requires a helmet and/or siren--as we’re going to get. Which is just fine by me. I recently raced my 22-month-old daughter to the emergency room after she had eaten a handful of her grandfather’s heart medication, and although she was bright-eyed and chipper 20 minutes after having her stomach pumped, I still haven’t recovered--from the drive, much less what happened afterward.

We were visiting my parents in Las Cruces, N.M., and so not only were we trying to make time in a hesitating, left-pulling rental car, but we were also peering through the dark for a hospital we’d never even seen before. I drove--and left my husband to hang over Fiona anxiously enough to satisfy my vicarious need but not so anxiously that it would upset her--only because I had a slightly better idea of where we were going.

When you’re driving your child to the emergency room, several odd things happen. The streets, with their stoplights and dividers, with their curbs and various symbolic admonishments, stop being streets and become merely terrain. The other cars undergo a similar metamorphosis--as if through night goggles or the depths of a video game, you see vaguely outlined obstacles. I stopped at red lights only after deciding that I could not afford to lose the time it would take to explain the situation to the police officer and demand an escort.

Fear seemed to fog the windshield, and I could not believe the callousness of those around me. The people pulling into gas stations, the guy walking out of the KFC, the driver next to me who was actually singing along to the radio--didn’t they realize that life as we knew it had just been officially suspended and would stay suspended until the doctor smiled up from his white coat and said “she’ll be just fine”? Didn’t they realize that we were headed to the emergency room?

When you’re driving your child to the emergency room, you tend to think in italics.

I remember as a child making several similar trips, usually with my father driving and my mother sitting in the back seat applying pressure through a bloody towel to whichever portion of the body my brother or I had injured. I remember the terse way they spoke to each other, the silence that ballooned between the words. At the time it never occurred to me that whatever had happened could not be fixed. Eventually, I knew, we would all be heading home again, with a new set of stitches and a few milkshakes between us. And so trips to the emergency room were sort of fun, in a highly fraught, wait-till-we-tell-the-guys way.

Children relish their war wounds. The playground tales of the hand through the window, the finger cut off by the sled runner and sewn on again, the blood pouring out of the cut over the eye, are as valuable and oft-traded a currency as any story from the battlefield or the delivery room.

But when you’re driving your child to the emergency room, you realize it’s never the parents who are telling these stories over and over again with wide-eyed relish.

Because it is simply impossible that you are sitting behind a wheel of a car, just like you do every day, checking the rearview, hitting your turn signals, pumping the brake while your child sits in the back seat with a belly full of poison. It just cannot be happening. You took your eyes off her for two minutes, three at the most and why would she even go into the dark room where the medicine was kept and how did she open it and is this how your life is going to turn out, is it going to be ruined forever on this nondescript night and why doesn’t that guy in the truck pick a lane and stay there so you can just get to the emergency room and endure whatever it takes to hear the doctor say “She’ll be just fine.”

When you’re driving your child to the emergency room, you realize that you can never know what impossible situation is unfolding in the lives of the drivers around you.

Sitting outside the trauma room while the nurses washed Fiona’s insides clean, I found consolation in two things.

When I was a kid, having had your stomach pumped trumped just about every injury or ailment the other kids could boast about, and as frantic as the drive over had seemed to me and my husband, Fiona had slept through the whole thing. And, six hours later, the doctor pronounced her “just fine.”

Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.