My first trip to the ER was pretty young, and was either a kidney thing or an asthma attack. All things considered, I'll take a smushed thumb.

Brave little dude.

You've reminded me to get my brother a stuffed infectious disease.

I keep putting a stuffed pertussis on my list but I can't this year because my littlest nephew came down with it at Thanksgiving and I think it'd be in bad taste. Plus my parents NEVER get it for me.

(And, yeah, let's not talk about how he got whooping cough and how it's well-known there's a huge, deadly outbreak in California and I am a huge OMG, get your damn vax proponent for the last several years since I discovered it existed still. Because I haven't vented my rage about it anywhere and I'd hate for one of you to get ambushed. Normally, I'd happily say we should discuss. Not so much this time.)

My first visit to the ER was either the first split open chin or the newspaper eating thing. Either way, 4 or younger. Or maybe the stitches on my knee. I totally don't remember those.

Ben was our ER kid. Swallowed a penny which got lodged at under three, cut his head wide open the next year. The stitches that required made my usually sunny, completely agreeable kid a screaming, hysterical wreck when it came to haircuts for a while. That was an interesting year for him, in hair.

My brother was an ER kid, too. Falls, concussions, broken bones. I came home twice from playing at a friend's house to find a neighbor waiting to tell me my parents had taken him to the ER.

He smashed his thumb in the hinge of the bathroom door

Yikes! I know of two different kids who suffered traumatic amputation of a digit in this manner.

(Both had their fingers sewn back on.)

My first ER visit was for drinking a bottle of something used to make glass grapes like these: [link]

In my memory, no one else in my immediate family has been to the ER. For themselves. I, apart from the pain management stuff, have been repeatedly. And then some more. I have flair.

My ER trips were all as an adult, a couple times for asthma, once for falling down a flight of tiled stairs, and once for a tooth infection gone horribly wrong. I hate the ER, although I guess I should be grateful for adrenaline shots and morphine.

We had enough kids and enough roughhousing that the Huntington Memorial Hospital ER staff knew my family by name at one point.

I find it retroactively charming that I felt I had "my" ER in London. Oh, like I knew what it was to have an ER.

I've had the same nurse three weeks in a row, and he's threatening to change his shift to avoid me. But he's sweet (if nosy), and never stops until he gets the line in and he doesn't give me a bolus, so I'm really glad of it.

This hospital is my hospital in so many ways, it's not even funny.