Another Monday Memory from the echolab

I had a repeat today that I love. Anxty, jittery, nervous, beautiful eight year old who lied and said he was nine.
He has a belly button that looks like a smiley face and couldn’t believe I remembered it because I haven’t seen him in two years.

Believe me, I’ve seen lots of belly buttons through the years.
Once, I filled a smart aleck, teenage, repeat customer’s navel with ultrasound gel. I warned her first, she called my bluff. In the end we all laughed, her mother laughed the loudest, and the patient quit giving me grief. But that’s another story.

So, of course I remembered his smiley face belly button.
He was stressed because of some new things going on that I wasn’t aware of. For some reason I told him about Curly having seizures. I have no idea why that popped up but, it did.

Curly hasn’t had a seizure in months. We were talking about his new pup and he asked about mine.
He asked how I knew that my pup was having a seizure, what I did, if Curly was on medicine, etc.
I showed him the picture of smiling Curly, told him how I held him until the seizure passed, and that I took him to the vet the next day. I told him what Dr. Root said about the seizures.
Medicine was an option, but I didn’t put Curly on it – we decided to work on changing some stuff. First thing was to take him off his combination flea, tick, and heart worm preventive and change to just heart worm stuff.
He held my phone and asked how many seizures Curly had.
“Two.”
“Me too.” He said, looking at Curly’s picture.

He just had an MRI.
After that he was relaxed, apologized for lying about his age and assured me he wasn’t taking a flea, tick and heart worm preventive, and that they were working on changing things too.
He talked nonstop for the rest of the visit and gave me a big, rib-cracking hug before he left and thanked me for listening.
It’s funny how the universe just knows.