E.R.
You say you're not going to be one of those parents, the loser rookie pediatrician-on-speed-dial type hassling the on-call doctor at 2 am about sneezing, or rushing their kid to the OR with a rash, since when you sign up for the whole parental thing, it's one the mantras they drill into you, repeat after me: It's probably nothing.
But then you have this baby sitting there engaged in some sort of typical baby project (dumping the contents of your wallet out on the carpet, un-doing neatly folded piles of laundry, extracting dog-eared, ex-lit-major paperbacks from your bookshelves one by one) when suddenly she begins to scream the strangest scream, a sort of jagged, wheezing, barking scream, and curls up into a ball.
Now, something is really wrong. Ruptured spleen wrong? Favorite gold earring that I lost in the carpet at undetermined time this week drilling a hole in small intestine wrong? Between screams she groans, like a war movie casualty. Her eyes are wild. Her screams disintegrate into an odd, exhausted trilling sound, a sound we've never heard come out of her before, and with that I'm on the phone to one clinic, and handing thepediatrician on speed dial to the husband, and we're holding this gnashing, pale child in our arms, giving each other startled looks, is it me? Or did something really bad just happen to us?
They filibuster. "We usually say that the child should scream for an hour before someone takes a look." "The doctor on call will get back to you, what's your call back number?" The baby is pale and gasping, and making a noise like Old Yeller after he'd been shot. Yes, it's time to overreact, I'm saying to myself, running up the stairs with the baby in my arms, where are her socks? Where's her health insurance card, the one probably dumped out on the carpet somewhere, under a layer of unfolded clothes? We're doing that thing they tell you not to do, it's decided then and there. We're taking her to the ER.
Now we live pretty close to the hospital but it always seems that people are driving so slow on your way there, I remember it seemed that way the day that she was born. I'd waited a wee bit too long at home, stoic, determined not to be one of those idiot moms who came rushing in at the first twinge of labor, only to be sent home in disgrace to wait it out.
The baby is in her car seat, and she is fading. I couldn't even bear to force her into a pair of pants, the car seat straps seemed to cause her intolerable pain. She is moaning and slumped, the color drained out of her face. Her eyelids are tentative, they begin to droop over her eyes, and for the first time a real sense of fear crow bars its way into my naturally skeptical heart, I'm slapping her cheek and telling her to hold on, I'm putting my ear up to her chest, is she breathing? How can you tell, inside a noisy car?
No one likes to see a baby in the ER. The people calmly sitting in the waiting room look up and wince as I stagger in, a half dressed baby dangling oddly in my arms. Revived by fear, she is screaming again, and I announce the obvious to the triage attendant: "something is wrong with my child."
So begins the restraining of the baby; the weighing, the temperature, the blood draw, the catheter. "She definitely has a temperature," the triage nurse says. Ah, so I'm not insane. They're always so casual, you're standing there with your wheezing, hysterical baby while they calmly discuss shift rotations and who didn't leave the baby-sized IV needles in the third drawer to the left.
The baby clings to me like a rhesus monkey while they tape glowing heart monitors to her toe, and stick instruments in her ear canal. She has found some reserve of energy somewhere from the terror and the intrusions and the strangeness, and she heartily screams, a little more of a normal kind of scream, sweaty and red-cheeked. Her color is back. They can't find the vein, darn these babies and their tiny veins.
And when the tide of blood-drawers and catheter-inserters washes out and we are left alone in the florescent white room of this new hospital wing (so much has changed when we were here years ago with that nasty cat bite) suddenly snatches of our old baby return, like feeble sun rays, she's calming down a little. The barking and the wheezing, they're gone.
It seems like a very long time, some calculable fraction of our lives before the young-ish doctor returns and tells us, all the tests, they came back clean. "I don't know," he says. He looks contrite. The baby, she reaches out to touch her glowing, heart monitor toe, and smiles.
"I have a one year old," the doctor says. "I've been in the ER seven years, and I used to just think, eh, but you know, now that I have a kid, I would have done the same thing." And so with that, we checked off that parental milestone, first inconclusive visit to the ER, and we all drove home, and put the baby to bed.
Before we go any further I feel it needs to be said that the Nup came over the other day and, randomly, broke into the worst song ever written by humankind: 
