You can tell a Homeschooling Family in the Emergency Department…

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…

Nut Roast Recipe

(Dave Blogging)
OK. Trying to get back into shape. Robyn recently snapped aphoto of me from behind during a recent trip to Lake Lure. …Ahem,….Sad revelation…

So today is the third day in a row I have worked out. Robyn is also a great cook, which is where I lay the blame for my less than svelte figure. So I put an end to that–I made lunch and dinner today. Lunch was plain old Quaker oats with Soy Nut Butter, skim milk and Worcestershire sauce–tastes as bad as it sounds. Of course, I had mercy on the kids and made PB&J and Batman Spaghetti-Os for them.

For dinner, I made a Nut Roast and 16-bean soup. They turned out pretty well, and as fortune would have it, we got a last-minute call from friends who came by for dinner. And, you guessed it, the husband is vegetarian. So it worked out well.

We first had Nut Roast on a trip we took to Scotland in 2001. During that time, they were recovering from Mad Cow Disease, so they had diversified their palates quite widely, and I was pleasantly surprised at the food fare, having traveled in England and Ireland in the past. So the nut roast is based on a variety of nuts ground in the food processor, and mixed with herbs, etc. Most use cashews, but I don’t since there are healthier nuts to use. We have plenty of pecans, since Robyn’s brother’s house has several fruit-bearing pecan trees and we get a healthy bolus when family visits. We also use toasted almonds (great flavor), and a few pine-nuts and sesame seeds thrown in for added flavor.

That serves as the base. We find that since we are getting the food processor all gummed up anyway, we go ahead and make a few batches (3 tonight). For two batches we added a second base of vegetable fiber (ground red and orange peppers, sweet onions from the garden sauteed with garlic cloves, cherry tomatoes and one golf-ball sized tomato from the garden), chick peas and split green peas, ochra (compliments of our neighbor’s garden), olive oil and bread crumbs. Please don’t ask me how much as we do it on the fly, based on what’s available and how big our bowls are. You can get several different Nut Roast recipes by searching on Google

We then split this into two separate batches. In the first we mixed in a plain green pesto (basil, pine nuts, sauteed onions and garlic, mixed cheeses, olive oil) we made fresh from the garden earlier in the week, with small cubes of tofu. In the second we mixed in red roasted peppers, sundried tomatoes, bread crumbs, tofu cubes, tempeh cubes, and a tomato-basil-mixed herb pesto we made earlier in the week fresh from the herb garden.

The final batch did not have the peppers, used the nut base, chick peas and split peas, tomato-basil-mixed herb pesto and olive oil. We also added an undisclosed amount of apple sauce since the batch was looking a little dry and crumbly as we mixed it. We could have used milk instead, but I was looking for a little sweetening ‘Zing’.

Finally, you throw them in the oven for half an hour while whipping up some Risotto, and ‘voila!’, you’ve got a meal! The consistency was excellent, and the flavor was really good (I was afraid the pesto would overpower the nut flavor, but it didn’t). Unfortunately, I enjoyed the meal too well and I am afraid I will be back to exercising tomorrow.

Until next time,
Dee-bu-o from Charlotte