“Peanut Butter Triage”

For a bedtime snack after service one Sunday night, I fixed my then 5-year old son a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which he happily ate while sitting in the kitchen.  I go to his room to get his Monday school clothes ready and hear him run from the kitchen.  The next thing I hear – 'BAM!!!  I run to the kitchen and find him lying on the floor with a mouth full of blood!  

While praying, I notice something floating in his mouth.  I ask him to spit it into my hand.  It's porous and saturated with blood.  "OH, NO!!!"  I say to myself, "He's bitten off his tongue!"  I wrap it in plastic wrap, put it in an ice-filled plastic bag and yell to my husband, "Call the doctor!  Isaiah's bitten off a piece of his tongue!"  Immediately we're all racing around the house.  Our pediatrician directs us to our hospital's emergency room.

All the while, our son is crying and talking through his tears, "I don't want to go the hospital!  I don't want a shot!  I respond, "Baby, it's OK – the Lord uses doctors, too."  

In the emergency room, a nurse rushes over.  Once shown the bloody ice pack, we're quickly taken to an examining room.  The nurse gently says to our son, "This will hurt, but I need you to open your mouth and stick out your tongue."  Obediently, our son does exactly that – out comes a bloody, but whole, tongue!  

My husband and the nurse turn to me and ask "What is that?"  "I don't know," I cry, "could it be from the inside of his mouth?"  My husband puts it to his nose – takes a whiff and says, "it's the peanut butter sandwich."  

Spirit Led Woman, Strang Publications, Palm Coast, FL. August/September 2007