At first, I thought he was just being silly.
He took a sip of the soda—something he’d only had maybe once before at a party—and made that dramatic little face kids do when it’s fizzy. He laughed. Jumped a little. Ran in circles.
But then he stopped laughing.
His eyes started darting around like he was seeing things I couldn’t. He grabbed at his cheeks. Scratched at his arms. He kept whispering, “Get it off, get it off.”
We were in the ER less than twenty minutes later. I couldn’t even process what I told them—something about a soda, something about him screaming and then going completely still. The nurses moved so fast I barely had time to cry.
Turns out, the soda had somehow been laced—with what, we still don’t know for sure. The hospital ran toxicology, checked every possible explanation. All I knew was that my little boy was lying in a hospital bed with wires taped to his chest and IVs in both arms. And I couldn’t fix it.
He stirred once and asked, “Am I in a spaceship?”
That broke me.
It wasn’t just a bad reaction. It was trauma, compressed into one horrifying hour.
The doctors say he’ll recover. That he’s lucky.
But now, every time I hear the fizz of a can opening, I freeze.
Because all it took was one drink.
The days after the incident were a blur of doctor visits, endless tests, and phone calls to toxicologists who couldn’t quite explain what had happened. The best they could guess was that someone, somewhere, had tampered with the soda. Maybe it was a prank, or maybe something more sinister. But the idea that someone would hurt a child in such a way? It made no sense. And as much as I wanted answers, it seemed like the world was giving me none.
When we finally got the green light to leave the hospital, I couldn’t breathe a sigh of relief. I couldn’t shake the image of my son’s wide, fearful eyes as he looked at me and asked if he was in a spaceship. I wanted to believe it was just a fluke, that he’d be perfectly fine, but something inside me had changed. It wasn’t just the trauma of seeing him so helpless. It was the nagging fear that maybe, just maybe, there was more to this than we realized.
Back at home, we tried to return to normal. We played his favorite games, watched cartoons, and ate dinner together. But there was an underlying tension. Every time I opened the fridge, every time I poured him a glass of juice, I couldn’t shake the thought: What if it’s not over yet?
That’s when it happened again.
I hadn’t given him a soda, but we were out at the park, and a friend of mine handed him a juice box—one he’d had countless times before. The second he took a sip, I saw it. That same look in his eyes, the wide-eyed fear, the scrabbling at his face. I froze.
“Mom, it’s happening again!” he cried, his voice trembling.
I rushed to him, desperate to stop whatever was happening, but it was too late. He collapsed in my arms, just like before. The world around me spun, the panic returning like an old friend I didn’t want. I scooped him up, running for the car as I shouted for my friend to call 911.
This time, it wasn’t the soda. It wasn’t even the juice. It was something else, something in him—something triggered by the trauma. The doctors later told me that the body’s response to certain stresses could sometimes become a pattern, that the mind could “remember” a traumatic event and react as though it was happening all over again. The juice, the smell of anything even remotely sweet or fizzy—it was all enough to set off his body’s response to the trauma he’d experienced.