Trivial Pursuits: The hand sanitizer incident

I’ve heard horror stories about kids sticking things in wall outlets, taking scissors to their hair and putting foreign objects in their mouths. When I lived in St. Louis, a co-worker was gardening in her yard with her 2-year-old when she realized her son wasn’t sucking on a grape, but a dead mouse. Even typing that makes me wince. 

While my 9-year-old, Greta, is a handful, we’ve escaped that murky kid phase relatively easily, aside from a popcorn kernel that “slid” up her nose during a family movie a few months ago (though I never found it). 

The wonderfully terrifying thing about kids – well, one of them – is you never know what they’ll do next, and trying to guess is futile, because there’s a good chance (insert your personal horror story anecdote here) wouldn’t have crossed your mind anyway.    

Maybe I’m unimaginative, but I’d never put much thought into what happens when a person swallows hand sanitizer until getting a call from the school nurse last week. 

The nurse had my daughter in her office and poison control on the other line. Actually, they had her on hold. I didn’t know poison control could do that.

At this point, it wasn’t clear whether Greta had ingested hand sanitizer. Three classmates who could supposedly shed light on this were being questioned in the principal’s office. Meanwhile, Greta was adamant that she hadn’t, and I was busy trying to imagine a plausible scenario in which she might. 

“The brand that we have is Equate, and it’s 60 percent alcohol,” the nurse was saying. “I smelled her breath, but it’s fine. She seems to be acting normal.”

Whoa. Back up. Alcohol? 

We disconnected, the nurse promising to call back after talking to poison control, and I hopped on Google. A lick of hand sanitizer wouldn’t hurt a child, but a swallow could cause alcohol poisoning, which could lead to low blood sugar, coma…

I jumped into my coat and called the school. After a brief hold, the principal came on the line with the actual story. Greta and some classmates had been kidding around, someone complained of thirst, and my kid put her finger under the pump of the class bottle of hand sanitizer and pretended to eat it. This was followed by cries of disgust from the classmates, which alerted the teacher. 

I was relieved. I was perplexed, trying to imagine a plausible scenario in which pretending to ingest hand sanitizer could be funny, but maybe it’s one of those situations where you just had to have been there. I was concerned – Greta didn’t understand the dangers of swallowing the stuff and, therefore, didn’t totally get what the fuss was about. And I was a tiny bit irritated – not at the school, which reacted as it should have – but more at the whole mess and misunderstanding and hearsay. The kids who initially claimed they saw Greta ingest hand sanitizer later admitted they hadn’t seen anything. 

My daughter expressed annoyance over missing math, her favorite subject, and listened quietly to my brief lecture. After a beat, she said, “Mom, eww. Did you seriously think I ate hand sanitizer? That’s disgusting!”

I had to agree.