If It’s Not Broken Don’t Fix It…If It Is, Well, Thank Goodness For ER’s And Insurance

Shawn and the kids went to the park.  I stayed home and made dinner and pita bread. It wasn’t a huge deal when one of them was crying when they all came home.  Injuries while at the park are rather common among our boys, or while riding bikes or scooters, while cleaning their rooms, or pulling weeds in the garden.  They’d been going down the slide one last time before coming home- Teddy on Shawn’s lap, supposedly a safer way for a toddler to go down a tall slide.  Shawn isn’t sure what happened.  When they got to the end Teddy just started crying and saying his leg hurt.  I didn’t think much of it, but Teddy was so very sad that Shawn put a cartoon on for him.  The crying immediately stopped, and he was happily engrossed in letter shapes bouncing across the screen.  It wasn’t until everyone gathered around the dinner table that I thought something may be wrong.  He got down from the couch and immediately fell down as he tried to put weight on his leg, and of course started crying again.  We put another cartoon on as the other boys ate and we looked up Urgent Care hours and insurance procedures.  I was going to stay home and clean up and put the kids to bed but I ended up going, mostly for moral support and because Shawn thinks I’m good company. 

 

Halfway through the paperwork at Urgent Care, Shawn asked me if I’d seen the sign at the receptionist’s desk.  Sign?  What sign?  I was too busy writing up Teddy’s life history, which was taking far too long for the short two years he’s been on this earth.  “It says the person who does X-rays isn’t in today.”  Hmm, maybe we should come back in the morning?  Just then one of the children bumped Teddy’s leg, and the previously cheerful, normal-looking little boy was sent back into hysterics.  We asked for directions to the ER.

Although it felt just a tad silly to be going into the ER with a child who had gotten hurt on the slide and who didn’t seem to be very upset about it at the moment, we figured an X-ray wouldn’t hurt.  So we trooped in, and had a relatively short wait (during which time Shawn tried to convince me that it was dumb to be there and we should just go home) and went to triage.  As I waited in the children’s play area for Shawn and Teddy, I heard screaming and knew a doctor/nurse had appeared to do something horrible to Teddy, like take his temperature or smile at him reassuringly while asking questions.  For some reason that child is absolutely terrified of doctors (or really, any stranger at all, but especially ones who try to touch him, talk to him, or look at him) and usually yells at them to go away and not look at him.  I’m not sure if that’s strange or characteristic of his age group, but my other two weren’t quite so vocal about their mistrust of strangers.  Yeah, Shawn said the temperature and heart beat was a blast. 

They were going to take two sets of X-rays but after one they sent Shawn and Teddy to another room.  Shawn said he should have figured it was because they’d found a break the first time so they didn’t need the second set.  They didn’t even need to strap Teddy down to do the X-rays- although Shawn said that wasn’t exactly pretty either.  It’s nice to have a smart phone with little kid games on it.  It’s still enough of a novelty to carry strong persuasive powers.

By the time the boys and I got tired of waiting and set out to find them, they were in an express room for discharge.  We happened to come in at precisely the right moment; the nurse was trying to lure Teddy’s mouth open for Tylenol with a Popsicle.  He was having none of it, until Olie walked in and said “I want a Popsicle!”  That did it.  He opened his mouth and let me squirt it in so his brothers wouldn't get his treat.  I was only told that he was being discharged, by the way, and did not yet know that his tibia was broken.  I figured it out when the doctor came in to put a splint on…which was not nearly as easy as the getting the Tylenol down him.  We all managed to live through it, and got out in one piece.  Teddy did relatively well, with a lot of cajoling, distracting, some screaming, and a little laughing.  Compared to a few of his mega-tantrums, he was an angel.  So we got ice cream on the way home.

Shawn is sheepishly glad we went to the ER, and considers it a decent reason for getting very little sleep tonight. He figures his teachers will forgive him for sleeping through class tomorrow.  Teddy still hasn’t figured out that he can’t walk for a while, and was continually telling us to get that “thing” (the splint) off of him.  I’m planning on lots of cartoons, games on my phone, books, and other distractions.  I imagine not being able to walk will get old for a two-year-old before lunch tomorrow.  Since I can’t pick him up very well right now (I can get him about as high as the couch) our range of motion and activities are limited. 

I'm grateful that it doesn't appear to be a very bad break (for all I know about these things), that it's our first broken bone, and that we were in a place where it could be addressed quickly.  Hopefully he heals in record time with no complications.