SHE SAYS...

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33384, 16 November 1973, Page 12

SHE SAYS...

Parents —get to work and clean out those car gloveboxes, door pockets, and cubbyholes. Do you know what’s buried away in them? I’ll bet you don’t. I didn’t. Until I found that one of our youngsters had found a dangerous-looking bottle of violently-coloured pills in the back-door doorpocket, I never dreamt that pills of any sort were in the car. Muttering things about careless husbands, I read the label—“do not take within eight hours of driving”—they didn’t sound too safe to me. So I telephoned the local chemist, as the label on the bottle gave only the drug’s name, not what it was for—and accordingly it didn’t mean a thing to me. For that matter. I couldn’t have even been

I positive the child had found - the pills in the car; she 1 might have picked them up r on the street, although I’d i had hold of her all the time, 1 so I was pretty sure this wasn’t the case. f The chemist immediately I said “hay fever remedy,” s which gave me a clue, s knowing that my husband - is an occasional sufferer t when the seeds and pollen ; are flying. When he returned from t work that night, I conl fronted him with the i bottle, and got a completely ■ blank look in return. ’ It wasn’t until I said “hay J fever” that he remembered: ; he’d bought them about ' three years before, and L popped them in the car’s rear door pocket before 1 going on a trip into seed-and-pollen country. He’d 1 never had to use them, fori got completely that he’d ever bought them, and—as you might have guessed by now—hadn’t cleaned out that wretched door pocket 5 once in three years! r It shows you how easy a i child poisoning could hap- » pen, doesn’t it—even when r people think they’re pretty careful about such things. Shows the value of cleaning the car out properly now and then, too.