The boy needed an I.V. But, like many kids, he was afraid of needles and was bound determined not to get one. He was on the backside of the unit, furthest from the nurses station, which is where we tried to keep transplant patients to keep them as far from other patients as we could. But, even from the nurses station, I could hear him yelling at the nurse to get out of the room.
I peeked down the hall a couple of times and saw that he was yelling at not only the nurse, but the physician and his mother too.
Yelling is hardly the word to use.
He was screaming at the top of his lungs for them to leave him alone and to get out of the room. He screamed at his mother to take him home.
I guess he just didn't realize the seriousness of rejection.
Anyway, after about a half hour of the screaming, I decided to go down to the room to see if I could offer some help. The nurse didn't know what else to do.
The doctor and mother were really frustrated. The doctor was asking the mom about getting some people to hold him down and sedate him via the I.M. route.
Mom didn't want to inflict that much trauma on the kid, but knew her son had to get treated or he'd most likely lose his kidney. I looked at them and said, "Let me go talk to him and see if I can make any progress."
I went in and saw that the boy was under the bed. He was crying and looking at me suspiciously. I said, "well, are you going to let me start an I.V. on you or not?" Of course, he just yelled for me to "get out!"
I thought about it for a minute, then for some reason, I thought of Developmental Psych (God knows, I'd never thought of Developmental Psych before). I tried to think of what little boys of this age were into or what would be funny to them at this age. He was eight, but maybe six or so developmentally.
I seemed to remember (right or wrong) that boys of that age were into anything ANAL. Anything that had to do with BUTTS was funny.
So, I got down on my knees, looked under the bed and said, "look, if you come out of there and let me put an I.V. in you, we'll have a farting contest." He immediately quit crying.
"No way," he said.
"You're just trying to trick me."
I said, "You've been under the bed a half hour now. What's another half hour. Come on out and we'll sit here and see who can make the grossest farting noises for a half hour."
He looked at me very seriously then, trying to read me, make sure I wasn't lying. "You really will do it, right?" he said.
"Really, no lie. A half hour of farts." I replied.
He came out from under the bed, held out his arm and said, "Go for it."
I put the I.V. in, we made a couple of farting sounds and he was laughing.
Mom, the doctor and his nurse heard him laughing and walked into the room. The first words out of his mouth were, "Mom, he's going to have a farting contest with me." Doc almost erupted, mom smiled, tapped her head and said, "pretty good, ... pretty good."
I looked at the doctor and said, "Go write your orders. We have a half hour of business to finish." All ended well.. well except the fact that I couldn't pass a nurse in the hall for 3 weeks without getting "farted" at.
