You can tell a Homeschooling Family in the Emergency Department…when the Dad carries a 4-1/2 year-old with a blood-soaked shirt in on one arm, and a canvas bag full of schoolbooks and flashcards on the other….
OK, it was another fine day in Charlotte…having worked 3rd shift, I was just getting up around noon and just poured my first cup of coffee. Good thing I happened to decide to put on jeans and a grubby T-shirt before I came downstairs, as I was greeted by bright smiling faces of “M”, one of my wife’s childhood friends and her 4 children (just visiting from VA), and her Mom, from Fort Mill, all of whom popped by for a visit. Unshaven, unshowered, hair looking not unlike Don King, I was slightly surprised, but not dismayed. The kids had just finished lunch and gone out to play in the back yard for about 5 minutes, and I was just warming up to my coffee, when my oldest boy #1 comes running in nearly hysterical, saying “Mom, {younger son #3} has got a big hole in his arm!!”
Now, being what I like to think of as a “cool-headed Dad”, I try to put all the kids’ “emergencies” into perspective…”OK, let me finish my coffee, and then I’ll come out and help him.”
Fortunately, my wife was a bit more on top of things at that moment, and realized his hysteria was not childish, but true terror. So she got up and triple-timed it out to the back yard, with me begrudgingly trailing to the edge of the patio (not having shoes, and still with my coffee in hand, I did not feel like experiencing the thrill of mud squishing between my toes as my first non-coffee feeling of the day). I then saw {younger son #3} slowly, half-dazedly kind of stagger out from the bushes with a blood-stained shirt as he was quickly scooped up by Mom and run back to the house. “Is it arterial?” I asked, coffee not tasting so important anymore. “I don’t know”, she replied hurriedly.
It turns out that the boys had been climbing some ‘trees’, or more like large bushes on the edge of the neighbor’s yard, and {younger son #3} had somehow fallen out of one. Not a long fall, but on the way down his arm got hung up on the 1 or 2″ collar left from a recently cut branch. “Hung up” is the working term, and older son #1 was truly the hero of the day as he had the sense to lift up and “unhook” his brother from the tree before running for help.
Thank God my wife was a nurse before she became a full-time Mom. After a quick check we saw he had a huge crescentic gash on the inside of his upper arm, that went deep beneath the skin, but looked pretty clean on the edges, and was no longer bleeding (much). It looked pretty bad, as it was kind of inverted and the fat that’s usually on the inside of the skin was all sticking out like a bad war movie. She gave it a quick wash, a patch-job with bandage and tape, and let me know one of us needed to take him to the Emergency Department. With the bleeding stopped, and the crying down to quiet sobbing, I realized that a visit to the ED would mean several hours of downtime so I had the presence of mind to grab some reading material and flash cards to keep us both entertained for the journey on which we were about to embark…
We got there a few minutes and a couple of lollipops later. If I had realized it, we would have skipped the lollipops since you have to wait 6 hours since the child’s last food intake if they are going to use any kind of sedation. It probably wouldn’t have made much difference since he had just eaten lunch before the fall.
So there we are in the ED, with nurses coming in to check on him, and him sitting there with his arm all wrapped up, and the two of us doing some flash cards and reading stories and both of us doing a poor job of pretending we’re not watching the TV we don’t usually get to watch at home. All the nurses coming in had the same comment: “You can tell a home-school family when they bring their books with them to the ED.” My response (jokingly): “That’s right, kiddo…bleeding or not, we’re going to finish lesson seven!”
One of the nurses knows my wife, and knows I work third shift. Since I am not looking quite like Gary Cooper (remember, I’ve still got the Don King thing working for me), she says “did you work last night?”
“Yep” I reply.
“Are you working again tonight?”
“Yep.”
“How’d you get stuck coming to the ED?”
After a moment of silence “I guess it was easier than staying home with the other five after they’d seen what happened”.
Remembering we’re not quite a small family she seemed to understand the picture and said “Got it.”
Regardless, the decision is made to try to wash out the wound and stitch it with local anesthesia, as examination shows that it is limited to the skin and fat of the arm, and the nerve and major blood vessels are intact (quite a blessing as I could clearly see them pulsing away with only air between me and them when they lifted the flap of skin to examine the wound).
Let me tell you, that little guy was some trooper. He hollered and cried when they gave him the numbing medicine (8-10 shots–could you blame the guy?), and then washed it out with cold sterile water. He was partly wrapped in a sheet to help keep him from jumping around. The nurse, a big Harley Davidson guy who was leaning over him to hold his injured hand, turned to me about half-way through and said “you’ve got one heck of a kid–he’s hollering, but he’s not moving…I am holding his hand, but I am not holding him down…he’s not moving: he’s LETTING the doc wash him out and sew him up”. I had to turn my head so {younger son #3} wouldn’t see the tears welling up in my eyes.
Funny thing is, he starts negotiating with the doc through his tears:
{younger son #3}: “OK, OK. No more, right? We’re done now, right?”
Doc says, “No we still need to do a few more.”
{younger son #3}: “How about just one more.”
Doc: “No, we need a few more than that.”
{younger son #3} (still crying, through tears): “OK, OK, how about just 2 more.”
Doc: “OK two more…after this one.”
{younger son #3}: “OK then, just two more…OK?”
Doc: “Yeah, just two more.”
{younger son #3}: “OK…good”
He got the unofficial “best patient of the day” award from the staff there.
Sixteen stitches, antibiotic ointment with bandage wrap, and one popsicle later he’s cool, calm and collected. Aside from a little redness around his eyes and a hospital gown you’d never know what he just went through.
After all this my little 4-1/2 year-old guy turns and says “thanks” to the doc. Fifteen minutes later, he’s talking calmly to Mom on the cellphone on the way home, and when she asks what he wants for dinner he says “Poppy’s steak!” excitedly. That’s the marinated flank steak on the grill that my Dad has perfected: “three minutes, (flip) three minutes, (flip) three minutes, (flip) three minutes.” The kids have got my Dad perfectly when they say this in imitation of him, with voice inflection and hand flip, to boot. Then he asks if he can have ice cream after dinner.
So we get home and I fire up the grill. The steak never tasted so good. The kids are playing around having dessert, and aside from favoring the arm a little, you’d never know what the little rascal just went through for the past 5 hours. I only wish I could shake it off as well as he could. My wife and I were just starting through the mental torture of thinking through all the horrible “what ifs” that you are thankful did not happen.
He’s still favoring the arm a few days later, but really being a trooper about it. The other kids call it his “shark bite”, and tell him he’s going to make a great pirate with that scar. He just told me the other day, “Daddy, maybe we shouldn’t climb that tree anymore.” We went up to Virginia for the weekend for a Kids Expo meeting for my wife and one of her businesses, and we were able to visit with both sets of grandparents and several cousins. My father-in-law, a big, burly gentle giant of a man rolled up his shirtsleeve at lunch the other day, exposing a long, thin, white scar with stitch marks along his huge bicep; same arm, almost exactly the same site as my little guy’s injury. Turns out he was cut by falling glass some years back, so now they’ve got twin scars. Pretty cool, to be a twin with Grandpa, huh?
Well, it’s never boring around here…
