I was afraid the neighbors were going to call the police.
It was 3:20 AM. The lights were on all over the house. And my five year-old was screaming “No! It hurts! Why are you doing this?”
She had a sliver in the sole of her foot. It was a quarter-inch long, cruel and black and buried too deep to grab even with tweezers. She’d been hobbling on it all day, refusing to let anyone get near it. She preferred the pain she knew to the unknown suffering of someone trying to dig it out.
“Let her sleep on it,” I’d said. “She’s too tired to be reasonable right now. I’ll get it in the morning.”
At 3:00, she woke up howling. Her ear hurt, she said. It’s been a while since the Age of Interminable Ear Infections, but fine, we know how to deal with such things.
And then she was throwing up and crying and trying not to throw up. My wife and I were gathered around her in the bathroom like some sick cheering squad. (“Let it out! Let it out! Waaay out!”) We couldn’t help but notice the slight red swelling around the sliver in her foot.
“Do you think…?”
“She doesn’t have a fever.”
“But still…”
“Okay. I’ll get the tweezers.”
My wife held our daughter down on her bed in a WWE-style hold. I grabbed the offending foot and hoped the other one didn’t break my nose. Once we got going, it took maybe three minutes to work the splinter out. They were among the longest three minutes of my life. (Right up there with Anakin’s “sand” scene from Episode II.)
“Got it,” I said.
Daughter stopped crying. She was fine, she said. Foot was fine, stomach was fine, ear was fine. The crisis was over.
And no one called the police.
