That One With the Adorable (Killer) Bunnies

Once upon a time, my friend gave me a title for my future autobiography. It is perfect. It is, simply, “Phone Calls to My Husband”.

The calls I’ve made to him over the years are nothing short of spectacular.

These are actual sentences I’ve said over the airwaves:

“Hey, so…I accidentally cut off our dog’s tail and the duct tape isn’t holding the tube sock bandage.”

“I’ll be late because I have to stop by a random lady’s house to pick up a craft Beckett lost in a parking lot that she posted about on Facebook.”

“The doctor said my neck is fine but I have a bird poop in my lung.”

I have the undeniable gift of getting into bizarre situations. Making insane phone calls. I don’t try to make it happen, it just does.

I’m a magnet. Ask my friends. They make fun of me all the time.

So, yesterday.

A friend invites us to a bunny petting zoo at the public library, being Easter weekend and all. We have nothing else to do, so my youngest two and I decide to swing by for a bit.

When we get to the library, the line for the bunnies is out the door and around the building. (There’s nothing moms of young kids love more than a holiday Instagram photo op.)

After waiting in line with a kazillion small children and flustered moms trying to keep their kids’ tiny hands from deshelving every library book in reach, our turn to get in the bunny pen comes.

It is adorable…..

….until the poop.

Turns out we picked the IBS bunnies with mushy poop caked all over their feet and butts, which then transfers all over my shirt and jeans. We leave the enclosure shortly after because nope.

As we’re headed out, I hear a little boy scream. I look over to see a mom holding her toddler saying, “He got bit. One of the rabbits bit him.” The people from the bunny farm (ha) look over casually and say, “Okay. Which bunny was it? You should probably wash his hand off in the bathroom.”

No one is concerned, everything seems fine….until the blood.

I walk into the bathroom a few minutes later to wash the poop off my pants and I see this mom holding her little boy, frozen in shock as she watches all of his blood swirl down the bathroom sink.

No one is helping her; there’s not a library or bunny employee in sight.

I step in and say, “Do you need some help?”

She looks back blankly, clearly so traumatized she doesn’t know what the heck she needs.

I grab the boy’s hand to wash his finger off and evaluate how bad the bite is.

When I see the bottom part of his finger dangling unattached in the water stream, I paste a smile on my face and say, “It’s all good. He’ll be fine!! You know what, though? Just to be on the safe side, we might want to wrap this up and take him somewhere to have it looked at. He might need a tetanus shot (and minor reattachment surgery), but it’s going to be just fine!”

I usher her back into the library in search of a first aid kit with gauze.

Blood is squirting everywhere – all over the circulation desk and surrounding floor, the poor baby is screaming his head off, the mom is frozen in fear, and we experienced a very similar situation to my middle’s Train Station Injury (the time he was Monty-Python-amputation bleeding and the employee handed me a fingertip-sized bandaid).

Because no one had checked on them, no one realized how bad it was. Turns out injury preparedness is not a strong-suit for public spaces.

After a few awkward and unsuccessful attempts to wrap the kid’s finger up for transport, I shove a bunch of paper towels on his hand and ask the mom if she’d like me to help her buckle him into his seat so she can take him somewhere.

When she looks back at me with these eyes,

I realize there ain’t no way she’s driving herself, in the rain, with a screaming child, to the emergency room.

I load her and all of our kids into my own car.

We make small talk the whole way. (I don’t really know what other kind of talk to make with a stranger in an emergency whose kid may or may not be bleeding out all over your back seat.)

I pull into the hospital, make sure she gets inside, and tell her I’ll take her keys back to the library so her husband can pick up the car.

I sit in the parking lot for a minute, trying to wrap my head around the last 10 minutes, and send one of my infamous texts to my husband.

Magnet. Told you.

I run in the library to drop her keys off and a lady says,

“Oh, yeah, that mom….where is she?”

She’s at the emergency room.

“Oh, really??”

Um, yes. The boy’s finger was dangling.

“Oh, wow. This has never happened before at bunny hour!”

………uh……….

“We should maybe have gotten her name?”

I have it. Also, something tells me you’ll be hearing from her.

(Emergency preparedness. Not their thing. Even when combining live animals and tiny fingers that look like baby carrots.)

I found the mom on Facebook a few hours later and reached out to check on them. Unsurprisingly, her boy had to get stitches but was good otherwise.

She said, “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t helped us!” I told her next time she saw someone in a bunny emergency at a free public library event she could pay it forward.

Sometimes I feel like we’re living in a sitcom.

(My friend, Courtney, who had invited us to the rabid bunny zoo, witnessed the whole thing, and corralled my boys while I provided medical attention agreed: “These things don’t happen unless you’re around.”)

A friend from church who was working in the back of the library at the time told me later, “While you were helping that mom, I heard my coworker point and say, ‘That nurse over there is helping’. I said, ‘Oh, she’s not a nurse. She just has 3 boys and is well acquainted with emergency rooms.'”

TRUTH.

Also, what is life.