By the way, I LOVE Alice Cooper’s nighttime radio show.

    Ideally, if your neighbor comes running up to your van as you’re pulling in the driveway, it’s with some happy greeting like, “Come right over! We’re barbecuing and just about to sit down.”

    That’s not what I did to my neighbors. I ran across the street and told them their 18-year-old son was at our house, on the phone with Poison Control because he accidentally drank some bleach. He didn’t know what to do and came over to ask my husband. My inclination was to dilute it with floods of water but I wasn’t sure.

    He’s fine now, by the way.
    This was much easier than the only other time I’ve talked to Poison Control. That involved my 3 1/2-year-old son getting into children’s chewable vitamins with iron and me not finding out until four hours later, by which time it was well in his bloodstream. That led to an ER visit, an unsuccessful attempt with charcoal and a two-night hospital stay.

    Let me add here that while ER docs are gentle to panicked mothers, they have nothing nice to say about huge bottles of pills. Granted I erred by having the bottle anywhere within climbing distance, but there was another step I could have taken that I didn’t know about: I could have dated the bottle. If you buy bulk quantities of any medication, please mark it with the date it’s opened. I knew my two children each normally had one vitamin a day, but I didn’t know if the bottle was two weeks old or two months old, and calculating the maximum iron my son could have swallowed was important.

    He too is fine now. He has vague unpleasant memories of being strapped to a table and having a tube fed through his nose, but that’s about it.

    On a lighter note, here’s a related joke, courtesy of my father-in-law:

    A woman walks into a drugstore and asks the pharmacist for some arsenic.

    He has known her a very long time and is startled. “Helen, you know I can’t sell you that,” he tells her.

    She shakes her head and insists that she would like some arsenic.

    He shakes his head in turn and says no, he can’t, he’d lose his license.

    She roots in her purse and pulls out a photo of a loving couple — her husband and the pharmacist’s wife.

    “Oh,” the pharmacist replies. “I didn’t know you had a prescription.”

    This post originally appeared on ourMidland.com, the online home of the Midland (MI) Daily News. Republished with permission.