Saturday, May 7, 2011

A Reason to Call Poison Control

Here's a memo to all girls out there who are planning to have tea parties with their stuffed animals.

If you are looking for something to serve as a straw, a black marker is probably not your best choice.

That's right... Katie Anne decided to have a tea party with her stuffed animals in the foyer while we were cleaning up the kitchen after dinner on May 3.  She set up all the animals with little cups, saucers, and plates for tea snacks.  Then, she decided everyone needed a straw for their tea cup.  What do you do with a straw?  You sip on it, of course.  Unfortunately, when you sip on the cap of a marker for a long time, the cap fills with spit... and ink.  When the cap pops off in your mouth, your mouth fills with black inky spit.  Not a good thing.

So, Katie Anne came running up to me, crying and screaming behind her hands (which were pressed tightly to her mouth), with blackish-blue something streaming out from between her fingers and running down her arms.  I freaked out - I had no idea what was pouring out of her mouth, and she wouldn't tell me because she thought she would get in trouble.  Finally, under threat of a spanking, she told us that she'd sucked on a black marker.  We rushed her to the bathroom, and Saunders started rinsing her mouth out as fast as he could while I called Poison Control.
Luckily, the very nice and understanding Amanda at the Poison Control Hotline said this was a very common thing with kids, and that - since the marker was washable - Katie Anne would be fine.  All we should do is rinse her mouth, wash her face (and hands and forearms since it poured out of her mouth), and brush her teeth.  Then, she needed to drink lots of water to dilute any ink that was in her stomach.  But, Amanda warned us that it might take some time for the ink to wash off... and it did!  Katie Anne was sporting the ink mouth with black lips and gums for almost three full days!




FYI ... all these pictures were made AFTER about 20 minutes of rinsing, scrubbing, and teeth brushing.  In the heat of the moment - when I thought my kid was dying of some kind of freak esophagus eruption or coughing up black blood or something - I didn't take the time to snap a picture of how terrible it actually was, but trust me ... these pictures don't do the first sight of her screaming and crying with blue-black liquid pouring out of her mouth any kind of justice.  :)

1 comment:

Trisha Jones said...

This is terrible! This happened to me once in church when I was little. I was in the balcony pew next to my mom while my dad worked the church lights at Tabernacle, and I was drawing on a kids' bulletin with a blue-and-white striped pen that our bus driver Mr. Bob had given us for Christmas (do you remember that--Merry Christmas from Mr. Bob?). I sucked and sucked on the open back end of the pen and let it suction and hang from my lips or tongue while I played tictactoe against myself, and the next thing I knew I had terrible tasting ink all in my mouth! It wasn't nearly as bad as KA's incident, and it was only enough to leave a terrible taste in my mouth and give me a blue tongue, but I know KA's panic. Thank goodness this wasn't a permanent marker or anything worse than a washable one!!!