Kids and Ketamine

I have a beautiful new niece named Lynnlee.  Peyton and I went to the hospital yesterday to visit her.  While we were there Peyton got a little too excited and ran into Emily's bed frame.  She fell back and freaked out.  I ran to pick her up and I was holding her and heading for the hallway (I didn't want the crying to bother Lynnlee) and on my way out somebody pointed out the blood.  I took her to a nurse who mopped it up (for a while the blood seemed to be never ending, which is weird because this all went down pretty quickly) and wasted no time telling me I had to take her to the ER.  She escorted me and, sadly, one of the ER receptionists recognized me.  By the time the doctor made it in to see Peyton she was not bleeding anymore.  He took a quick look and confirmed she would need stitches.  Peyton said, "Sixes!?  I want sixes!  I want blue sixes and pink sixes.  I want sixes on my butt!"

The doctor also decided that he wanted to give her drugs so that she wasn't bouncing all over the place.  Since the cut was by her eye he was afraid she'd move and it'd be too risky to do it without.  He decided to give her Ketamine.  I said, "Whoa.  You want to give my baby a horse tranquilizer!?"  He insisted it wasn't a horse tranquilizer.  He was wrong.  When the nurse went to give P the shot Peyton screamed, "I be sowy!  I all bettah!  I be good!  Don't hurt Popeye!"  Broke.  My.  Heart.

I don't know if you've ever had the misfortune of seeing somebody on Ketamine, but it was absolutely horrific to see my baby like that.  She was sort of in a trance.  Her eyes were open but she couldn't move at all.  She produced a lot of spit and she started choking on it because she couldn't swallow (she couldn't really choke either, it is difficult to describe) so we had to suction it out.  They said she would come out of it in 10-30 minutes.  It took her over an hour and a half and I cried almost the entire time.  I remember taking a drug class and learning that people coming off Ketamine often scream and cry because it causes a weird type of nightmare.  I put her hand on my cheek and  starting singing her favorite songs.  As she came out of her trance-like state I could see her trying so hard to mouth the words but she still couldn't move.  The second I stopped singing, she screamed this pitiful scream because she still couldn't move much yet, not even her lips, so I would start the song all over.  After an hour and a half she was able to sit up enough so I could hold her but she still couldn't hold her head up.  Toward the end she was saying some pretty hilarious things but I couldn't even appreciate it because I was so heartbroken over the whole ordeal.

Around midnight I called Chris to come over because I was so spent.  He found somebody to chill out in our house with Juju and he came to the emergency room.  Poor Popeye peed all over her clothes and the bed.  It took the staff over half an hour to take care of it because they were so busy.  So she was this poor, stoned, naked girl in a cold room By the time we took P home she still couldn't walk by herself and when she sat up she would say, "Whoa! WhooooOOOOooa!  Whoa!"

Anyway, all that for 2 little stitches.  The Ketamine was much worse than the stitches.  She is perfectly fine now.  OH!  The hospital is footing the bill because it happened there.  Even though it wasn't their fault.  Nice, eh?