Can you tell me how to get to Safflower Street?

Four-and-a-half years into this parenting thing, and we've hit a food allergy. In November a Trader Joe's opened in Princeton, and so we started making a few trips there trying to figure out the allure of this place for its many devoted followers. Its primary appeal seems to lie in yummy products that can't be found elsewhere, so in our random sampling of things that sounded good and that we don't get at our regular grocery store, I picked up a bag of sesame-seed-encrusted, honey-roasted cashews.

A few days later Edith and I were sharing them, among other snack foods, when she suddenly announced that her tongue felt itchy. At first I thought it was an odd passing notion of hers, but as she started to get increasingly agitated about her itchy tongue, then added that her lips felt swollen, I looked more closely, saw hives around her mouth, and realized she must be having an allergic reaction to something. I gave her Benadryl and tried to soothe her in her discomfort, while keeping an eye on whether she still could breathe freely. The symptoms continued causing her discomfort but not acute distress, so we proceeded with our evening agenda, heading over to the campus dining hall for dinner. By the time we got through the line and sat down, Edith started rolling around on the floor moaning that her stomach hurt.

At this point--about 5:30pm--we got out the cellphone and tried to get through to the pediatrician's office. It was a frustrating task. No one was answering, so after ten minutes on hold with Edith continuing to cry intermittently about her stomach pain, Tom hung up, started the phone tree over, and this time chose the after-hours, contracted-out, emergency nurse hotline. He got a nurse on the phone right away, but she said our pediatrician's office technically wasn't closed yet for the night, so she couldn't take our call. The stomach pain didn't seem to merit 911-level attention, so it was back to waiting for someone to pick up in the pediatrician's office. I got through after 27 minutes on hold, during which time I'd started to speculate on one of the reasons health care costs are so high in this country: people calling 911 out of sheer frustration with inaccess to more appropriate levels of care, perhaps?

The nurse I spoke to said that it was now after hours, that there were no pediatricians left in the office, but that she thought the situation merited attention. She told us to keep watching Edith for signs of difficulty breathing, and to come in first thing at 7 for follow-up with a doctor.

Edith shortly thereafter seemed much better, to our relief, and we were able to attend her preschool Christmas show without further incident. We were prepared to see the doctor the next morning at 7 to have her examined and review what had happened, but when we got home from the show and listened to our voice mail, we discovered a message from the anxious and somewhat irritated nurse, saying it was 7 and where were we? It hadn't occurred to us that if a nurse told us at 6pm that the pediatricians had all left the office and it was now after hours, that our appointment with a pediatrician scheduled for "first thing at 7" was to be at 7pm rather than 7am.

We finally got medical care the way we get much of Edith's medical care these days: We snuck in a question about her at one of Alice's many infant physicals. Our regular pediatrician is still novice enough that she seems open to this repeated ploy and doesn't even charge extra for answering the questions. This time, in fact, she gave our question a good deal of attention and scheduled Edith for bloodwork on Christmas Eve...which turned into a preliminary diagnosis, and then this past week a follow-up with a pediatric allergist and a full-scale skin test for 15 different allergens.

And the answer at the end of the day is that Edith is allergic to sesame. Significantly so, but not critically so -- as in, she shouldn't eat anything with any sesame in it, probably shouldn't travel in China anytime soon, and should be wary of cross-contamination at salad bars (where we've already had one problem), but she can certainly be in the presence of other people's sesame-filled foods and presumably can still safely visit Oscar, Big Bird, and the gang at the waterpark in Bucks County next summer.

***

As long as we're talking health care and describing our week in television titles, then the other relevant one is E.R. At a tender 12 months, Alice was the first of any of us ever to be admitted to an emergency room, after a misstep at daycare this past Wednesday brought her down on the arm of the toddler-size sofa, and she split her lip. She had a pretty wide and jagged gash that we suspected would need some attention--though by the time we arrived to get her she was as happy and smiley, if blood-stained, as any victorious prizefighter.

This time we got through the pediatrician's phone tree in less than five minutes but were told that "we don't do the pink part of lips" [ed. note: what other part is there?] and were instructed to go to the E.R. So Alice and I got insight into that side of the American medical system while Tom and Edith headed for pizza. It was quite exciting: They sped her in through the double doors on a guerney, everyone yelling and machines beeping, and immediately six doctors were bent over her speaking tense, hurried jargon, while I stood in the corner weeping. Five of the doctors were sure it was a laceration and were prepared to suture, but one young, headstrong doctor remembered a rare disease which causes 1 in every 3 million infants to experience rapid deterioration of the lip beginning around age twelve months in weather under 30 degrees, and he realized the condition could be life threatening if he didn't act immediately to perform a dangerous, highly controversial, but critical procedure not yet approved by the AMA or the FDA. The other five doctors ridiculed him, but he insisted, declaring to hell with protocol and announcing that he would heroically go it alone in a last-minute effort to save my baby. By this point I was hysterical, but as the rest of the staff pulled off their latex gloves and walked out of the room in protest, this young doctor bent over Alice and, with a laser-beam-like stare of fierce concentration, performed the miracle maneuver. Within moments, she came out of the coma into which she had been spiraling, her cheeks pink and her breathing normal, and the young doctor had the satisfaction of my undying gratitude and the other physicians' sheepish humility, even if he stands threatened to have his credentials stripped this time next week.

Okay, not quite. It's true that we didn't have to deal with much bureaucratic intake, because once they entered Alice's name and DOB in the computer and confirmed that she'd been born at that hospital, they didn't need any more demographic or financial information from us but just printed out her legband and labels, which was nice. But if there was little bureaucracy, there also wasn't much drama. Alice tore up magazines and toddled up and down (with help) in the quiet waiting room for an hour, then in our little curtained-off corner of the ER for another 45 minutes or so while we waited for the arrival of the physician's assistant who apparently was the hospital's best at stitching infants. At least two other kids were there for lacerations from falls, but they were older, and other people felt better equipped to deal with them.

But Alice was really an excellent patient, except for the ten or fifteen minutes pinned in the baby papoose with the burka over her whole face except the mouth, with someone poking needles into her lip. (During the stitching the physician's assistant, who was otherwise quite calm and competent, did object at one point that all Alice's crying was raising her cranial pressure and causing her to bleed more profusely. I didn't respond to him, just calmly admonished, "Alice, think of your cranial pressure." A beat later the nurse said, "Yeah, like she could think of her cranial pressure instead of Ernie or Bert or something!" Lightbulb.) But almost immediately after they unstrapped her she was fine again, curled up on my shoulder, misidentifying the overhead light as an apple. The joy of an infant's ability to live in the present. And another silver lining was that the crying tired her out enough that she slept through the night for the first time in weeks.

Even more to the point, the rate at which this wound is healing is astonishing. You can see it change by the hour, meaning I never even got an intimidating picture of our tough kid for posterity. Watching Alice heal makes one understand why people have searched so hard throughout time for the fountain of youth.

Even so, I wouldn't mind if next week in our family life brought just reruns of The Cosby Show or the Brady Bunch...

Twelve hours after suture. As we left the hospital Edith wanted to know why the medical staff hadn't just "gotten some blood and a chunk of lip and put them back on Alice." Edith's knowledge of medical procedure seems to come from Gary Larson's "The Far Side."