Oh, what a night

Parenting To-Do List:

Make at least one visit to the emergency room while child is still a toddler

Check.

OK, calm down--she is totally fine, and the trip may not have been fully necessary, but nevertheless, it sure makes for great blog material. So grab a snack and get comfortable.

Last night I got home from work, and started working on dinner. Tony was doing various things, and Pete was watching TV. Suddenly, I heard a loud "thunk" which I knew was the sound of Ari falling, hard. I heard Pete say, "Oh, Ari, what happened?" and then Tony's urgent voice said, "Honey, she's bleeding." I grabbed the whole roll of papertowels and rushed to the living room.

Tony was already using the handtowel out of the bathroom to stop the bleeding, while she writhed and cried and protested. There were spots of blood on the carpet, and her arms and shirt seemed covered in blood. I wiped off her arms while Tony continued putting pressure on the wound. As we waited, we tried to figure out what had happened. She had obviously hit her head on the coffee table--and not just on the coffee table, but on the very sharp corner. She was just walking around--not climbing on the couch or anything like that. We're thinking she was standing on her tiptoes (a random thing she likes to do now, and she tends to lean forward as she does it) and lost her balance.

I offered her her pacifier to help her settle down, and noticed that it was getting blood in it. I pulled it out, and saw that her mouth was bleeding just a little. We immediately thought she had the same injury that her friend Nicholas got the other day--from what we could tell, it seemed like she had some skin caught between her front teeth. We tried to get a good look, but she was having none of that, and we didn't want to tug too hard at her lip and cause it to bleed as profusely as Nick's injury had.

After we got the bleeding from her head to subside, we had the great debate--ER or not? We first called our doctor's office--we got a hold of the on-call nurse, explained the situation, and she paged the doctor on call, Dr. M. She's not our normal doctor, and she speaks with a very strong accent, so Tony had a hard time understanding her when she called back. Dr. M told us she would call the ER for us and let them know we were coming. (I'm still not sure what the point of this was, since the ER is first-come, first-serve--it's not like it was going to get us in any faster. But it was a nice gesture, I suppose.)

Neither one of us were panicking, and neither injury seemed too severe, but we wanted to be sure. We couldn't get a look inside her mouth, and the wound on her head looked a little deep. It was a small spot, but it looked almost like someone had jabbed a pencil into her forehead--we wondered if it might need a stitch or 2. So we packed up our stuff, left Pete at home, and headed to the ER.

We got there around 7, and the longer we waited, the more we second-guessed ourselves. Her mouth now looked just swollen--we were starting to think that maybe she hadn't been bleeding from there at all. We had put a band-aid on her forehead before we left the house (an Ariel one, if you must know), and that seemed to be containing the bleeding. Plus, Ari was acting like herself--walking all over the place, making friends with some of the other little kids, playing with the toys (it was a children's hospital, so luckily, the waiting room was full of toys). After a few hours, feeling like maybe we had overreacted, we decided to leave--Tony went up to the nurses' station to ask them to remove our name from the list. We had just gotten out the door when someone from the hospital followed us out and told us our name was next on the list. We looked at each other and shrugged--we'd already waited so long, what was a few more minutes?

About 15 minutes later we got called back, and a nurse took a preliminary look at Ari. She put some antibiotic/numbing ointment on Ari's head and covered it with the World's Biggest Bandage (a giant piece of gauze secured with medical tape). She got a quick peek at Ari's mouth, but, like us, couldn't get a good look. She did say there was definitely a cut in there, so we were right that her mouth had been bleeding. After this quick check, we were sent back out to the waiting room.

I'm not sure what time it was by now, but it was most definitely well past Ari's bedtime. Of course, in all this mess, she had completely missed supper. I finally gave in and pulled a container of applesauce out of the diaper bag to feed her. No sooner had I done this, then our name was called. But it wasn't to see the doctor--it was just to fill out some forms to help move things along. The lady who called us back immediately noticed I was feeding Ari, and told me I couldn't do that--if she needed to be sedated, she would have to have an empty stomach, blah blah blah. I resisted the urge to argue. She was nice about it, though--doing the whole sympathetic "I know it's hard, I know she's hungry" bit. She ended up going and checking with someone, and getting permission for us to feed her (I guess they decided that the chances of Ari needing to be sedated were pretty slim). And after Ari scarfed down the applesauce, the lady asked if I wanted more. Surprised, I said yes, grateful for her thoughtfulness. She also got us a couple small cartons of apple juice--after Ari was done the applesauce, I mixed the juice with some water in her sippy cup.

After filling out the forms, it was back to the now-too-familiar waiting room. Tony and I spent the rest of our wait taking turns walking around with Ari. She was so tired that she barely wanted to walk at this point, yet she didn't want to be held. So we'd put her down on the floor, but she wouldn't even stand up. So we paced with her, doing what we could to keep her content and quiet, hoping she might drift off to sleep. But she fought sleep like a champion--if there was a prize for resisting sleep, she would have won, hands-down.

Finally, around midnight (so if you're keeping track, it's been 5 hours now) we got into a room. Where, of course, there was more waiting. Ari was still fussing--wanting to be held, yet not wanting to be held. We finally laid her down on the bed, where I rubbed her tummy to soothe her. In a matter of minutes, she dozed off.

Of course, as soon as she got nice and relaxed, the nurse came in, followed shortly by the doctor. They managed to get the bandage off her head and get a good look at that wound before she woke up fully and freaked out. The cut on her head looked so weird by then--it was swelling, obviously, but the numbing ointment had made the skin around it turn this strange whitish color. Her cut was still oozing, but not bleeding badly anymore. The doctor looked in her mouth, and said that there was a small cut in there, but nothing that needed stitching, since wounds in the mouth heal so quickly. He did seem to think her head needed a stitch or some glue, more for cosmetic reasons than anything else (to reduce scarring). But he wanted another doctor to take a look, so we waited again. Of course, after the trauma of being so rudely awakened, Ari was not about to let her guard down and fall asleep again. She amused herself by pulling herself up on her knees with the railing on the side of the bed. Her next maneuver was to stand, and Tony and I kept pulling her down. All we needed was another head injury. Of course, if there was ever a place to get a head injury, I suppose a hospital would be the best place.

Dr. #2 (sorry, I have no clue what their names were) came in, and agreed with the stitch for the same reason, and said he preferred a stitch to glue because he's seen too many cases of people coming back with infections from the glue. So off he went, and we waited again.

Dr. #1 came back, accompanied by a nurse who would help him hold Ari down. And here is where the real fun began. The doctor used a sheet to swaddle her, to immobilize her arms--this actually relaxed Ari, and sent me down memory lane, as I remembered how she used to love being swaddled as an infant. But once the nurse clamped her head in his hands, she flipped out again--she is not a big fan of being restrained in any way (and who can blame her, really?). The doctor rinsed the wound out with water while she screamed and squirmed, tears pouring down her face. Tony held her legs with one hand and kept his other hand on her chest, to make sure her arms didn't escape. I rubbed her tummy and stroked her cheek, murmuring softly to her as he worked, assuring her that we loved her, and we were right there, and she was doing great, and she was going to be fine. This was the only time I got teary-eyed, because the look in her eyes just about killed me--it was more than just annoyance, she was seriously panicking. Once the doctor actually started the suture, I had to avert my eyes. There's just something wrong about seeing someone thread a needle through your child's forehead.

He worked very quickly, and Ari settled down quickly afterward--the poor thing was sweaty and bright red from all her struggling, and beyond exhausted. The doctor gave us some antibiotic ointment, gave a few instructions, and then promised to come right back with more instructions. So, again, we waited. Eventually, a nurse (a different one) came in with the instructions for us, validated our parking (so we wouldn't have to pay for it), told us we'd be billed for the visit and that we were free to go.

As we left the hospital, the road we would normally take to get back on the highway was closed. We didn't know where to go, so we drove down the next street, and saw a few cop cars pulled off to the side of the road. They were all standing around outside their cars, not looking particularly busy. Tony slowed down, rolled down his window, and asked, "How do I get to the highway?"

One cop looked at him haughtily, and replied, "Hi."

Not understanding him, Tony repeated his question. "How do I get to the highway?"

"Hi." A little more snooty this time.

"What?" Tony asked, utterly confused at this point.

"Well, I just thought you might say hello or something before you go asking for directions," the cop huffed. When Tony stammered a bewildered, "Uh, okaaaaay," the cop finally gave us directions, in a clipped, annoyed tone.

We drove off, both of us stunned by the encounter. Tony spoke first. "I really had no idea what he was saying--I thought maybe he was telling me to take High Street.... Besides, I'm on a one-lane road. I didn't want to block traffic."

I was seething. "It's not like when cops pull you over, they come up to your window and say hi and ask you how you're doing. They just go, 'Do you know why I pulled you over?' Geez."

"I'm tempted to go back there and tell him, 'Look, I just spent the last 5 hours in the ER with my one-year-old and it's 1 in the morning--give me a break.'"

"You should."

I told him I knew what the cop was saying from the beginning, but was too startled by his rudeness to react. After we got home, when we were getting ready for bed, I was still annoyed by the whole encounter. Sure, you could look at it as Tony being rude, but come on--we were in the lane in the road, not pulled over, so he was trying to get the info quickly and keep moving. There was no need for that cop to be so high and mighty.

Ari barely woke up when we got home, and after showing Uncle Pete her stitch, Tony put her right to bed. We both got ready for bed as quickly as we could, and crawled under the covers, groaning about how good the bed felt after spending most of the night standing up and walking around, hauling around a 24-pound kid, and not eating supper.

I peeked on on Ari before leaving for work this morning, and she was sleeping on her tummy (as usual) and laying on the side of her head where the stitch is--silly kid. I just talked to Tony and he reports that she's fine. He had to clean her wound and apply more antibiotic ointment, which, of course, she hated, but other than that, she's OK. We need to make an appointment with her doctor to get the stitch taken out on Tuesday or so, and then this whole ordeal will be over.

Hey, I look at it this way--we made it more than a year without any serious illnesses or injuries. I think that's a record to be proud of.

And before you ask--yes, pictures will be coming soon...