We had a bad scare on Saturday...

Saturday morning Rich and I woke up to Ashley running into our room around 8am telling us that Alyssa and Angela were eating medicine. We went out to the kitchen and there was packaging all over the floor. As I called the poison control, Rich was trying to make piles of all the packaging to figure out what they had gotten into. 8 sudafed's tablets were missing from their packaging, 2 childrens benadryl, 2 childrens tylenol, 1 youth tylenol, and 4 childrens dimetapp chewables. Both Alyssa and Angela had been sitting in the floor in the middle of this, so we didn't know who had eaten what, so they had to calculate the danger if either of them had ingested all of the medicine. It put them over the kilo/gram percentage that they felt comfortable having us observe at home, so they told us we needed to take the girls into the ER for observation.

Of course Rich and I are scared to death at this point. Rich was ready to load the girls up and take them by himself to the ER- when I told him that we could wait 5 minutes to call someone to come and stay with Alex and Ashley so both of us would be able to go. I called our friends, and woke them up out of bed and told them what had happened. By the time we had changed the girls out of their nighttime pull-ups and into clothes, our friends had arrived. Steve and Rich gave each of the girls a quick blessing, and then we were off to the ER.

Our local ER is great. We walked in, and registered and they had us back in an exam room before the registration was complete. The girls had to drink activated charcoal- We were able to get Angela to drink enough through the straw, but Alyssa refused. Later she told us it tasted like oil (motor oil, not cooking oil). So they had to hold her down and use a syringe and squirt it into her mouth and down her throat. That stuff is messy... and the nurse wound up with a lot of it on her arms as well as all over Alyssa's mouth and neck and chest. Then they had to hold her down to get a catheter urine sample, and to put in an iv line and draw blood for testing. Once they got done with Alyssa, we then had to hold Angela down for the catheter and iv as well. Our little girls were not cooperative at all (who can blame them?) so it took a lot of hands to keep them still for those proceedures. They might be small, but they are pretty strong and wiggly!
After all of that they were exhausted and cuddled up in Rich and I'd arms in a rocking chair and on the bed and took naps for a little bit.

By then the Relief Society network had been activated, and my visiting teacher had called to see what she could do. We had a four hour wait until they would have to take another blood draw, so we asked her if she could stop at our house and get a dvd player so the girls could watch some movies to pass the time. The ER had ordered some lunch trays for us so we had something to eat.

We watched movies and played and when the four hours were up the girls had another blood sample taken. They still resisted, but not as much as earlier that day. Then we had to wait about another hour to get the results back from that and find out if the levels of medicine were low enough that they were fine. Thankfully the levels were fine and nothing else needed to be done. We were released around 3:30 in the afternoon.

Alex got to hang out with our friends family for the day. Their kids are all older, so he got to help them help their daughter set up her classroom, and just hang out with them for the day. Ashley had previously made plans to go spend part of the day with a friend, so that friends mom just kept her for the whole day when she found out what happened.

We went home and just spent the afternoon cuddling the girls. Angela fell asleep around 5pm and slept straight through till 5am the next morning. I think she probably had eaten more medicine than Alyssa... she was telling me her tummy hurt while we were at the hospital, and was a little hyperactive that morning when we found them.

The medicine was in the cabinet over the microwave oven/hood combination that is installed above the stove. Alyssa must have climbed up on the cabinet and then just barely been able to reach the doors and pull the medicines down from up there. There were medicines that would have been much worse that they could have gotten into, so we were lucky that the ones they got into did not have any long term effects on them. I'm sure Alyssa has learned her lesson, but Angela is young enough that I don't think she fully understands what happened. For now the medicine is all boxed up and on the very top shelp in Rich and I's closet. I have to climb on a chair and onto a table to barely reach it, so it's safe up there until we find a combination lock and box that we can lock it up in.