Topic: Coinage

Author: Chris Dunn

I sit tiny on the giant chair clutching my mother’s hand and staring up at the ghostly image pressed against the brightly lit background. The room itself is incredibly white and bright, but the box with the pictures is brighter still. Two ribcages sit on the box’s left-hand side. They look to be nearly identical and are washed in a crimson-hue compared to my boring, gray, projected torso. When I inquire about them, the man in white informs me they are for another patient and feature contrast dye which gives them their distinct color. This clear, present day, HIPAA violation fails to shock my young mind, it being far more concerned with the apparent inequity of my bland, colorless chest shown beside. You can barely see the outlines of my ribs, but clearer than anything is a large, perfectly round circle in the center. The doctor nods and records his notes using a device like a CB radio, “Case number ####. We have Christopher Dunn. Age 3. With a penny in his stomach.”

The day had started out so normal. My siblings and I were all loaded in the back seat on our way to celebrate the first day of the 4^th of July weekend. I don’t remember where precisely we were headed, but given the time, it was likely a lake or a trail or a fossil-filled creek bed. My family was much more of an outdoor bunch in my early days. The infant Marty would have been strapped between my sister and I, as we sat buckled in place by the complex, airline style seatbelts in Debby, our ’65 Mustang. A day of fun and sun awaited us at some distant destination, but we would never reach it.

Bored, as only a child can be, the blurred miles passing outside my window providing no entertainment, I amused myself with the small pile of coins I had somehow come to possess. “Don’t put those in your mouth!” Mom had insisted. So, of course, that’s where they were. Her back was perpetually turned, and her attention sapped playing navigator as she always did, so I was free to explore my defiance. I wasn’t going to swallow them! How stupid would that be. See! I can push them around with my tongue. I can store them between my teeth and my cheek. Take them out. Put them back in. I can even roll them around on the back of my tongue and then pull them back forward. I wonder how far is too far…

“Oh, shit!” One went down the back and will not come back out. I can feel it back there and though I know, on some level, that it is too far gone, the fear of “Trouble” fills me with a panicked adrenaline. I begin desperately trying to hock it up like some metallic loogy, but my quiet retching only succeeds in alerting my parental units to my plight. “Chris?” mother asks. “Chris, what are you doing? Are you okay?”

I was reluctant to confess, but panic had pushed out fear of punishment. I had done it! I had swallowed the coin, just as she told me I might. She also said I could choke on it if I did! Was I choking? I needed help! So boldly I declared, “It went down.” As if it was the coin's fault. Even at the young age, I was skilled at the art of dissembling. “A penny.” I continued to retch, hoping that if I might yet dislodge the coin that this would prove the worry unfounded.

There were questions, panic and directions from the front seat, but I paid little heed. My attempts at performing a simple shaman’s trick failed to reproduce the swallowed object, but they had made me fairly nauseated. “I’m going to puke!” I announced, and a towel was stretched across my legs. I vomited on the towel – so much for our beach plans – but no coin was found.

Next I knew, my father snatched me from my seat and carried me in a desperate rush toward a red sign saying EMERGENCY. I recall being impressed when he vaulted onto the loading dock in a single stride unburdened by my weight. “I need a doctor!” he demanded as he cradled my tiny form. The nurse at the desk heard the panic in his voice and immediately went for help while I took in the bright, white room. A sharp, antiseptic stink clung to the air and the chairs were filled with dour  people their faces draped in various stages of annoyance, curiosity or boredom.

What followed was my first X-ray and then a fairly typical doctor’s visit. Choking had been avoided and the coin had been located. The doctor’s boredom at my case was in stark contrast to my parent’s panic. “Nothing much to do,” he said. “You just need to check his stool for the next few days to make sure that the coin passes.” That didn’t sound so bad, but I was too young to realize that “checking my stool…” would require my mother to don gloves and physically search through all my solid wastes in one of the most mortifying moments in my then young life. For what seemed an eternity (three days in fact) I had to shit in a bucket and then watch hopefully as my mother quested for the lost coin. Like everything she did, Mom tried to do it in good humor, but it was hard to hide her disgust.

I think she kept the coin as a reminder for me of what I had put her through. If I ever dared to question her advice or love, she could pull it out and say, “Remember this!?” I did – and do – remember. For years afterward, I would ask, “Do you still have that penny?” The first few times she would produce the envelope, but eventually it was, “In a drawer somewhere…” Until one day, I stopped asking, and the memory faded to the background shenanigans of youth.

Then, 50 years later, you’re going through a drawer…