In a previous blog I mentioned taking a weekend trip away from home. It has taken a few days to process a scary event that took place but I now feel ready to share it.
There is nothing like feeling helpless as a mom. That is exactly how I felt when Sunday afternoon I was sitting inside an airport in Charlotte, North Carolina and my husband called to tell me that a nearly tragic event took place in our home.
On Saturday my 17-year-old son and his good friend had attended a party at someone’s house. One of the pastors from our church is moving to Texas and so a going away party was held for his teenage son.
My son and his friend left the party early and went back to our empty house. No one else was home when they went upstairs to my son’s bedroom. My son has a BB rifle that he keeps in his closet. We have never allowed him to keep it loaded and in fact, keep the bullets on a different level of the house, high up on a shelf in a closet.
His friend had picked up his BB gun and asked if it was loaded. My son was sitting on his bed tuning his guitar and replied, “I don’t think so.” The next thing he knows, a shot is fired and he looks up to see his friend holding his neck. Blood is trickling down.
Long story short, his friend called his parents to pick him up and they ended up taking him to the emergency room. They discovered that the BB pellet was lodged inside his tongue. There is nothing they can do, other than wait for it to work its way out.
My husband is telling me this story and my stomach is churning. I feel like crying. I can’t do anything in North Carolina but really, I couldn’t have done anything even if I was home.
The doctor had also told the parents that if the pellet had been one inch over, it would have hit his jugular vein. Yes, he would have killed himself. The realization of that continues to sit with me and I have been having a lot of difficulty getting over it.
I was left to try and process what happened. I was angry at my son because he had apparently taken the pellets and put them in his room. We still don’t understand why there were pellets in the gun, when my son insists he had never loaded it.
There is more to this story, which I will share in my next parenting blog but for now, the point of this is to remind parents who allow their teenagers to have weapons in their house to be more vigilant in safety. I don’t regret that we allow our son to have a BB rifle. However I do regret that we didn’t take more drastic measures to lock away the pellets.
There are certainly a lot of lessons to be learned in a situation like this. Hopefully this will serve as a reminder to other parents that even if we feel we can trust our children, we may be putting others at risk.
Related Articles:
I Wish I Had Parental Controls on My Children
Learning from Our “Ouch” Moments
Photo by ardelfin in morgueFile