I wear radioactive pants.

I hate the smell of urine. Conversely, dried maple syrup smells like urine to me, so I hate maple syrup too, but that's another issue and mine to own. Anyway, you can imagine my disdain when, after yet another medical test, I had to coax my three-year-old into peeing on command. This child has a bladder of steel and has been known to not pee for almost 24 hours. So when we were told that he couldn't leave the hospital until he'd emptied his bladder, we did everything in our power to get him to comply.

Now, I didn't quite get why we couldn't leave the hospital until he'd emptied the bladder of steel, but sometimes I don't question things. And given that we'd already been at the hospital for hours trying to keep our child clam while the staff stuck tube after tube of this liquid or that IV into him, we were tired. Husband and I took turns standing in the urine-stinking restroom, begging, pleading, demanding, running the water, counting down, begging some more. But nope. Camel Boy refused and held his ground.

Finally, after three trips to the bathroom, I squatted down in front of him, water in the sink running, and said in my most convincing Mommy-voice "I... need... you... to... pee...". Magic. And bulls-eye. Why in the world did I have to stand there, in direct aim?

When you're a mother of two boys, you learn to overcome the disgust of bodily fluids. Or at least that's what I have convinced myself. I nonchalantly did my best to clean my shirt and pants and we walked back to the examine room. The nurse there saw my feeble attempt to clean my clothes and stopped dead in his tracks. "Did he pee on you?"

Here's where I could have lied and laughed it off and said something witty. But nope. I'm not that witty and I'm also a terrible liar. "Um... oh, that... yeah."

The nurse rushed past me and came back holding what I would swear was a device stolen from the set of some 1950's movie about a nuclear power plant exploding. Sure enough, he swipes the hand-held meter over my pants and tells me I need to take them off because they were radioactive.

It's not every day you get to carry your radioactive pants out of a hospital while wearing scrubs that are about 30,000 times too big for you and act like you meant to do it.