My daughter had a pretty rough week last week. First, she picked at an ingrown toenail until it became infected and needed to go to the doctor for antibiotics. Then she ran crying into our room in the middle of the night after waking up from a nightmare, tripped over a startled cat and went face first into our bed frame. She's perfectly OK, but she's sporting a black eye bigger than every bruise I picked up in my brief professional wrestling career combined.
Luckily I'm married to a nurse so rather than flapping my arms and screaming "Oh God Oh God My Baby" like an idiot I am carefully controlled and dispatched to fetch disinfectants, bandages, ointments, creams, ice packs, medicines, towels, cotton balls, lotions, and comfort objects from the plush obelisk in my daughter's room. Every bump and boo boo in my home is treated with the same calm, professional care you would receive in a hospital if you happened to work in a hospital where the staff all wore Doctor Who T-shirts.
There is one drawback to this approach, though, and it's that there's not a lot of lying involved because my wife is all like, "SCIENCE!". Let me tell you something; lying is awesome. Seriously, lying is the basis of everything good humanity has ever come up with. To lie is to imagine, and the ability to imagine a world that isn't but that could be is literally what makes us human. Lying is magic, and if done right lying will make your life a lot easier for a kid in pain.
My first example is in the form of a question; does it hurt to pour hydrogen peroxide on an open wound? The answer is yes, and also no.
When I was a kid I remember very distinctly slicing my hand open on the lid of a cat food tin (I'm not bright). Like any little kid when my mom started to treat my fish byproduct-smelling cut I asked if every step in the process was going to hurt. Mom said no, and I watched happily while little bubbles formed on the cut on my hand. To this day I can pour peroxide on pretty spectacular wounds and feel no different than if it was water.
My wife had the opposite experience as a kid. Her mom told her that peroxide does hurt, and she winces whenever it is used on her. So which is it? It seems like a pretty objective question, but in my house there are two separate answers.
In fact, our daughter has a weird variation of both of them. She doesn't complain when I apply peroxide to a scrape because I told her it didn't hurt, but does when my wife applies it because my wife told her it did. Even weirder, the pain is now connected to the applicant used. I tend to use a folded up square of toilet paper to apply peroxide, my wife uses cotton balls. It's gotten to the point where our daughter won't wince from my wife as long as she uses toilet paper because toilet paper makes the peroxide not hurt.
It's insane. It's magical thinking. It's the entire basis of medical hypnosis and who gives an actual flying fart? It makes my little girl feel better when she's smited by the Great Lord Oops, the God of Minor but Still Painful as Heck Accidents.
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