Today's Trauma

It's been a rough night here. My hubby is out of town for work and so the kids and I have been on our own here. After dinner my 3 year old was playing in his room. He had a long pole/stick thing that one of the older kids had been using for something. Unfortunately, the 3 year old hit his ceiling light fixture with it and it broke, sending large sharp pieces of broken glass to the floor. I heard him scream and KNEW it was NOT GOOD. I ran in to him and there was his lower leg sliced open about 6-7 inches long, and rather deep. YIKES! I grabbed him up and got something to wrap around it and put pressure on it. I got one of my kids to go see if our neighbors could help us by watching the other kids while I took the 3 year old to the emergency room. I had them organized and out the door to neighbors within probably 4 minutes, and took my 12 year old along to the hospital since I needed someone to help hold the cut leg and keep pressure on it.

Of course, I do all this rushing only to get to the ER where they let us wait for hours before getting the poor child stitched up. They had a lot of other people in there and I was told that since my kid's situation was going to take more time and concentration, the doc wanted to deal with all the other people first. Yeah, great. I managed to keep my little patient patient happy by drawing little pictures on index cards. He was such a good little buddy, with only the occasional comment, "Ouch! My leg hurts!"

The doc decided to give him a shot of something that was both a sedative plus has amnesiac qualities, so supposedly he won't remember the trauma of the whole thing tomorrow. (I asked if I could get a shot of that too, since I was feeling rather traumatized myself!) After the shot he fell asleep which I thought was great for him, but unfortunately, he woke right up once they got down to business with the shots of lidocane (to numb the area) and the stitches. They probably gave him 10 shots of the lidocane in various places and it sure didn't seem to help much. My poor baby was screaming and crying and his lips were quivering in pain. It was terrible. He needed a layer of stitches on the inside, plus 10 more on the outside.

So now he's all bandaged up and snoozing. The neighbors took good care of my other kids. We don't have any relatives nearby, and in times like these I sure am thankful that I at least had some good folks next door who were willing to help me out.

So, that's what I did on my Saturday night. How about you?