What happens when someone takes your implants

What happens when someone takes your implants?  Chance found out today after swim team practice.
Chance met me as I was leaving my room and said, "Someone took my implants."  He looked like he was trying not to laugh so I took his face and turned it towards mine and said,"Chance, are you being serious?" I wasn't sure that he was.

Then he hung his head and I could then see that he was not joking around and was trying not to cry, not hiding a laugh.

There would never be an ideal time to have someone take the implants, but this morning was especially challenging.  We had family friends from overseas visiting and it was the day we were taking them to the airport.  There were last minute errands to run and packing to finish up.  To add to the mix, their car, which they planned on dropping off at a relative's house, had a flat tire, so I needed to run them to the tire store and then off to run some errands.  All in time for them to catch their flight.

And now, Chance's implants had gone missing and he couldn't hear a thing.  Chance had put his implants with his shoes, towel and pajamas bottoms that he wears in the mornings to stay warm on the way to the pool.  He does this every morning, usually tucking the implants inside his shoes.  He does not put the implants in a locker because he has them close enough so that he can grab them and put them on for instruction when he needs to. He puts the implants on when he needs to hear, then takes them off to swim.

I immediately set out to find his back-up implants which of course were not where I thought they were.  It turns out I just didn't grab the right box which had been pushed back behind the other boxes.

Chance's brother had asked at lost-and-found before carpooling from the pool but they didn't have the implants.

Chance did not tell his swim coach or any of the people at the pool that the implants were missing. I think he was in shock and thought someone left with them.

I called Chance's dad who ended up coming home from work to help so we could divide and conquer.
We are talking about $16,000.00 worth of machinery here, more-or-less, and only one could be replaced by insurance.

I headed up to the pool and informed the swim coach, many of the staff , the receptionist and the manager that we had implants go missing and if they saw them to please turn them into the lost and found.

I also started looking around the deck of the pool.  Swim team involves a large time-span of kids coming and going, plus, by the time I got back up to the pool, swim lessons were about to begin.  That meant that every half an hour new kids and families would be arriving at the pool.

There was no telling where the implants had gone.  A young child could have picked them up not knowing what they were,  if they had been removed from the shoes, they could have been knocked into the pool.......
On the way to tell the coaches what had happened and to see if they knew where the implants were, I was looking around the pool deck looking for any sign of implants.

As I was searching around the hot tub area,  a woman in the hot tub asked me if I was looking for something.  When I explained the situation to her, she said that she had seen something moon shaped on the deck of the pool over  a few yards but didn't think anything of it.  I went to look at that spot, but didn't see anything.

Now I knew that the implants could be floating around anywhere on the deck, being kicked around as people walked past.

I ended up taking  some of our guests to the tire shop, while the rest of the group joined Chance and his dad to spread out and search the pool deck.

Thankfully, both implants were eventually found.   One was turned into lost and found, and the other was found next to a garbage can, on the other side of the pool.  We are not proud people - we had even searched the garbage cans.  Chance's pajamas bottoms were next to the garbage as well.

The next time Chance met me at the house, he was beaming and pointing to both implants which were sitting on their rightful place on his head.

We have all started to breath normally at our house again.  We are very thankful to our guests who went on an implant hunt with us and to whoever turned one of the implants into lost and found.

I think we've had enough implant excitement for a while and need to take a little break to breath:)