Chicken Heads and Broken Glass

[Guest guest]

Monday was an eventful day. I started a new job. Then went out to dinner

in Chinatown with family and a large group of friends. Billie is very

picky and will usually eat only one thing in Chinese resturaunts...what she

calls " Chinese chicken nuggets " but the rest of the world calls chicken

fingers. This time I was quite amazed that she actually took a bite or 2

of several different dishes rather than saying " I don't like it " without

even tasting. Very impressive...then they brought out the chicken, cut into

pieces, including the cooked and severed head sitting upright on the

platter. I have to say, I thought it was a little grotesque but it put

Billie right over the edge. My kid who has been almost symptom free for

the past 2 months or so got extremely anxious and began having lots of Os

and a few Cs. This was not helped by the fact that her obnoxious teenage

sister started to joke about bringing the head home. Then the lobsters and

the fish were brought to the table with heads still on. She couldn't eat,

kept excusing herself to the bathroom and hiding, could only sit at the

table with both hands over her face.

At the end of the meal Billie finished her soda and discovered a piece of

broken glass in the bottom! The glass itself was not broken, just a piece

sitting in the bottom of the glass. She had been chewing on her ice cubes

and stuck the glass (3 cornered about as big as a nickel) in her mouth

before noticing that it was glass and not ice. Then she said " A minute ago

I was just chewing my ice cubes and one wouldn't chew so I just swallowed

it. " So, of course, we didn't know if she had actually swallowed a piece

of broken glass or not. People have died from swallowing broken glass so we

decided we had better go to the Emergency room to get her checked out. We

took her and the piece of broken glass to the hospital. They xrayed her

and the piece of glass. They said if the piece we had with us showed on

the xray that any inside her should show up on xray too but there was no

guarentee it would. The piece we brought in did show up and they didn't

find any inside. Of course, they also had to do a rectal exam to check for

bleeding. They sent us home with a whole list of things to watch for. Of

course, by the time they sent us home it was 1 AM so Billie was too tired

to get up for school the next day. So far we have seen no sign of any

glass related problems and, much to her credit, she seems to have gotten

control of her OCD symptoms again, though I'd say she continues to be a

little more anxious than usual.

Kathy

Not planning to go back to THAT resturaunt anytime soon.

--

Kathy Mac, LICSW

email: macdonald@...