. . . and then they brought more morphine.

OK, so what had happened was -- last year the tall boy livened things up around here when his lung collapsed. I can tell you way too much about this phenomenon, which is called a spontaneous pneumothorax, but whatever -- Google it if you must. The salient point is that once you've had one pneumothorax, your odds of having another one increase to 50%.

Well, now fast forward to last Thursday, when the tall boy said in a conversational tone, "I think I might need to go to the emergency room."

One waiting room full of H1N1 germs and a chest x-ray later, we got the fabulous news that his lung had begun to collapse again, and that we should be prepared in case he needed to have surgery. For the tall boy the important fact here was: no eating after midnight, and it was now 11:30. What to do?

Wendy's in the E.R., baby! Because that's how we roll.

Awesome fact: The Wendy's version of a Happy Meal has Scooby-Doo trivia card dominoes, with a secret decoder! The merry-go-round, on the other hand, has been pronounced lame.

It's a scary thing when your firstborn, the light of your life, is wearing an oxygen mask -- but you do see that he's texting someone, right?

So then a bunch of scary stuff happened that was not funny at all and hard to make light of, but words like cardio-thoracic surgeon and I.C.U. and pleurodesis were bandied about. Oh, my people -- they removed a piece of my child's lung. No pictures. [Actually, a picture of this exists -- the surgeon took a picture of the hunk o' lung and gave it to us as a memento. And the tall boy totally posted it as his profile picture on Facebook. But not here -- I can cope with just so much, but no more. I'm just saying.]

Hilarious note in this completely not hilarious day -- the tall boy, it seems, knows some really good swears. He used them all on the nice wonderful saint-like nurses in the recovery room, as they ran -- seriously, RAN -- to get more morphine.

At the end of this sucky day, the tall boy's life had been saved by an on-the-ball E.R. doctor, a pulmonologist who treated us like we were his own family, a surgeon who gave off a totally calming Chuck Yeager air, and all those saints nurses. Put your life in this woman's hands, and all will be well.