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Photo courtesy John Winters Thanks to The Boren Foundation, and Jack and Karen Kay Leonard for making this website possible. |
Gramma's Purse
The Indiana Poison Center staff members handle more than 70,000 calls for help a year. With years of experience on the phones and, often many more in the emergency room or trauma center, these 16 people provide a valuable service to all Hoosiers.
Most calls involve minor incidents. But for some incidents, the advice of the Indiana Poison Center staff can be the difference between life and .
When it comes to kids, the staff uniformly puts one issue at the top of their list of concerns. Grandparents need to take better care of their medicine around kids. Once a week or so, a child must go to a pediatric intensive care unit as a result of a grandparent’s medicine. The following is a story relating of one such call from a grandma in March 2000.
You get a call in the morning. Your grandson is sick and your daughter needs you to come to her house to take care of him because the day care won’t take a sick child. You like to help out, and the toddler is great to be with. While his mom talks about the terrible two’s, you enjoy watching his curiosity in action, especially now that he can build things with blocks so skillfully. He can be tiring, but he grows and changes every day.
Because you daughter needs to go to work, you leave in a hurry. You take your bottle of blood sugar pills for your diabetes and put it in your purse.
At ten o’clock, it is time for him to eat. After getting some food warmed up in the kitchen, you find that he has gotten into your purse. The cap on the medicine is open. You worried about having a bottle without a child-resistant cap, but your arthritis makes the twist-push motion painful. You wish you could remember how many pills were in the bottle, but you are pretty sure you had no more than the three pills that remain. Yet, the more you think about it, the more you are sure that no pills are missing.
You call the Indiana Poison Center just to be sure. They helped you years ago when your daughter got oven cleaner on her arm. Fortunately, your daughter has their number — 800-382-9097 — posted by the phone.
The man on the phone is helpful but insistent — a single pill could seriously hurt your grandchild. His blood sugar may drop to dangerously low levels, and his brain won’t have enough sugar to function. He could go into a coma. Definitely not the reassurance you wanted to hear. He tells you to go immediately to the hospital.
You hesitate. You love your grandchild so much that you could not be responsible for hurting him. And you are sure that you have all the pills you brought. You talk with your daughter and decide to call the pediatrician instead. You do not realize that with thousands of medicines available, the pediatrician might not know which ones are harmful for children. He is not familiar with your pills but his advice that it might not be a problem is reassuring. You let the emergency room know that you probably won’t be coming in.
The nurse at the emergency room calls you back and wants you to bring the child to the hospital — thank goodness that your daughter’s phone number was in their record. But the process took time. Around noon, you arrive at the hospital. Your grandchild has been acting sleepy. As you carry him in, he goes limp. You cannot wake him.
When you talk with the nurse at the front counter, you can see the relief and concern in her face. She explains that they had been trying to reach you for several hours. The man at the Indiana Poison Center had briefed her on the situation and they know just how to help. The emergency room staff are able to resuscitate your grandson. After an overnight stay in the pediatric intensive care unit, he is fine. You are relieved and now keep your purse well out of your grandchild’s reach.