Crewel

I spent five and a half years with Patrick and never once learned where the children's hospital is located. Seventeen months of Caroline and Edward and I now have a favorite parking lot there (red) and a favorite parking level (E.) I also have a favorite grievance, which goes like this:

Dear Fellow Parents With Sick/Hurt Children,

I know! The hospital! I am so sorry that you are dealing with a child in distress. I understand completely how you feel as I, too, currently have a kid covering her car seat and the window with blood. Stressful, isn't it?

I also know you are having a hard time so I hate to mention this, but did you happen to see those enormous signs that are hung every six inches along the interior parking walls and that read COMPACT CARS ONLY? I understand that the sign at your particular space is obscured by the hood of your Suburban but perhaps the one next to it or the one just past that one or... ? Yeah, well, the reason they try to limit vehicle size, particularly right at the ends with hairpin turns (what we on the Formula One circuit might refer to as the chicanes) is that when you park your GIANT ASSED SUV there you make it almost impossible for someone to get around you. So that it is necessary to execute a fifteen point turn in order to proceed in a linear direction from level B to level C while a little girl screams and spits blood at the back of your head.

This is really fucking annoying.

Sincerely yours,

A Friend

So last night I left the room for five seconds (I had to pee. Steve was in charge.) Then I heard a wail followed by silence. As any parent will tell you, the moment you hear your child cry you tense and wait for the follow-up. Initial cries are all the same - they tell you nothing about the situation. It could be a toy skirmish or a cat dispute or a bump or a sudden realization that the kid doesn't. like. canteloupe! So you tense and wait and the longer you wait the worse you know it is going to be. Children inflate like balloons when they are hurt, instinctively filling their lungs to a capacity that will render that next cry sufficiently telling. Caroline went off like a bomb/air raid siren all in one. I knew it was bad but when it was followed by Steve's urgent "Julia! JULIA! JULIA!" I almost tripped in my haste to get out of the bathroom (it was six hours later that I realized that I had never managed to zip up my pants. nice.)

"She's bleeding," Patrick reported, looking sweetly concerned as he alternated between patting her foot and wringing his hands.

I lunged for her and made those soothing nonsensical noises that one makes as one tries to figure out whether the child has knocked out all her teeth or ripped her lip off or what, exactly, it is causing so very much blood to gush from her mouth. I discovered that her upper teeth had cut just below her lip on the outside and her bottom teeth had punctured the inside of her lip on the reverse. I could not quite tell if she had bitten through but I did not think so. I put a cold cloth on it and rocked her and called my friend Noelle for a consult. When do you get stitches, being the question of the day.

She said if it was still bleeding after ten minutes with pressure it should probably get checked but she called her family doctor husband to confirm. He did. I looked at Caroline's gash and decided to take her to urgent care immediately, ten minutes be damned.

Things to know for future reference: they do not use face glue (fine, DermaBond) around the mouth as it is not effective there. The urgent care doctor (who is part of our pediatric practice) did not want to do the stitches herself as she was worried about scarring so she sent us to Childrens. In retrospect I should have just taken Caroline straight to the emergency room rather than waste time with the detour through urgent care but that's ok. I didn't know. Now I do. As we left the doctor said that it was going to be traumatic for Caroline and, oh, she knew that the ER was busy what with all the flu cases so try to stick to a corner and good luck.

Greeeeeeeaaaaaat (choking, skin cancer, drowning AND THE FLU.)

For four hours I never put Caroline down.

The triage nurse who admitted her put some kind of numbing gel on a pad and then tried to secure the pad under Caroline's lip with a complicated series of bandages that wrapped all the way around her head. She looked a bit like Christopher Robin with the mumps, only the banadages were hot pink and purple. We waited forty-five minutes before we were sent to a room at which point the doctor figured out that Caroline had pulled her lip up from the numbing gel so that her chin was probably feeling nothing but there was no way they could stitch her lip together. So we repeated the gel pad and I walked her around for another forty-five minutes.

Finally they decided she was as numb as she would ever be. They strapped her to a board. She pulled her hand free. They secured the hand again. She pulled it free again. They told me to just hold the hand. Then they started on the stitches while Caroline fought like a wild thing. She freed her other hand. Then she kicked her feet out. I had my entire body pressed against her to hold her still while she screamed and screamed and kicked and screamed.

She got five stitches. I aged five hundred years.

When I got home we gave her lashings of Motrin and milk and clean pajamas and she crashed immediately. Then I went to check on Patrick who was reading in his bed. I told him about Caroline's stitches and about how she fought so hard she broke the restraints.

Patrick beamed.

"She is one tough little wonderbaby," he said.

 

PS The stitches run just under her bottom lip.
PPS Remind me to tell you about the Amazing Adventures of SuperPatrick and the Wonder Babies.
PPPS The whole time I was at Childrens last night I was grateful that we were there for something so relatively minor. It felt like a luxury to know that it would suck briefly and then be done. There is absolutely nothing like sick and hurt kids en masse to make you feel humble.
PPPPS She has been looking this tragic all day long. It's killing me. Like, I trusted you, mommy, until the whole painful bloody hold me down thing.

Comments

[Ordy]

Oh wow. So sorry yall had to go through that, but very glad it wasn't any worse.

[SarcastiCarrie]

I'll say scars build character (just in case it does scar). But it looks like it's right in that chin dip anyway which will go a long way to hiding it for the future.

And there is nothing like a sick kid to give you perspective (regardless of how sick your kid actually is...the fear is the same).

[Holly W.]

When my son was about 3 1/2, he fell onto the smokestack of a Thomas the Tank Engine, making contact with it about a half an inch above his left eye. At the emergency room he kept walking up to people, saying, "Look! I have a hole in my head. Do you see the hole in my head?"
He got five stitches, too. And he doesn't remember it a bit. Caroline will forget this, as well. :)

[sheilah]

She is so cute, sweet little girl. 'Wonderbaby', I love that.

When my son was 2-1/2 his little hand got slammed in the car door nearly severing the tip. I was the designated 'holder-downer' too.

He is 6-1/2 now and you can barely even find the scar. I hope Caroline heals as well.

[karyn]

Oh poor Caroline. She looks very tragic indeed.

Speaking of numbing gel, when my daughter was about 3 she had some splinters in her foot that I could not get out even when I snuck into her room in the dead of night armed with tweezers. They got infected and I had to take her to the hospital to get them taken out. The gel was applied, they wrapped my daughter in a blanket like a mummy, and she proceeded to fight her way out of it with two nurses and myself pinning her down while the Dr. dodged tiny, angry feet.

A week later she broke her leg, and nary a peep was heard from her as the Dr made the cast. The Dr even commented on how composed she was. I told him he was lucky he wasn't on duty the week before during the splinter incident.

All this to say that, I too, and impressed with your wonderbaby, and hope she gets better soon.

[T]

Oh my gosh, I had to jump to the bottom of your entry just to make sure everything was okay! Poor little Caroline, she does look awfully tragic, but I am so glad that that was it!

[Becky]

Sounds like when Alex met cellulitis. Only with dead people involved.

[Cookie]

Oh poor thing. And poor Caroline! It's the most awful thing in the world when your child has to get stitches. Or be in the ER. She's still gorgeous.

[cherylc]

My daughter, now 8, got bitten by a dog on her check when she was 18 months old. Her father and I had to hold her down, as she thrashed trying to escape the sheet she was encased in. She got three stitches, there is a scar, but it doesn't detract from her beauty. Also, she was scared of doctors for a couple of years, but she continued to love dogs as much as before. Go figure.

I'm sorry you and Carolyn had to go through that.

[Cathy]

Poor Caroline...I hope she gets better really soon.

[Kara]

Aww, she's got a supermodel pout! So glad she's okay...

[Kizz]

Wonderbaby with Angelina Jolie lips, now!

Glad it was finite and fixable. Poor girl. Poor both of you!

[BV]

Wow, that sounds absolutely harrowing. Knowing you're doing the best thing for her doesn't make the strapping down and hurting of your baby any better! I hope you are not feeling too guilty, because of course you did do the only thing you could. She needed the stitches.

But it still sounds like one hell of a night. Much sympathy and well wishes.

[Cobblestone]

Hey! While you were at Childrens we were at our local regional care trying to save the tip of my 9 month olds left ring finger.

Check that. First we were at regional care {3 stitches} THEN were at the ER {four more}.

I hope that Caroline scored some Loratab for you because JC's is helping me a lot.

[Snarky Mommy]

Yesterday must have been Midwest Child Injury Day, as I had a 3-year-old who hit the ground with his forehead and nothing else after running full speed down the length of the yard. Oh my holy hell, the road rash and the bump.

I actually laughed out loud at your telling of this. High comedy. But also felt appropriately bad for sweet Caroline. She won't remember, only you will. The beauty of parenting young children: life-scarring events burned into your brain forever!

[Beth]

Poor baby! Poor mama! I, too, have had to do the holding down thrashing child medical emergency dance. Horrible. (My 9yo daughter has a dashing scar on her cheekbone from face-planting on the wooden play-castle when she was three. Oiy).

Patrick's comment made me tear up.

[Q]

When I worked in a children's ER, I loved working with kids who needed stitches and casts. Fixable problems as you say. Everyone else seemed to fall into 2 groups - either awful, awful tragedy, or kids who would have been better off skipping the 4 hour wait with Tylenol and cartoons.

[plumwin]

When I was about eight I was teasing our bassett hound and she reached out and playfully gashed me above the eye. I remember racing into my Dad's office (he worked from home) and the stunned look on his face as blood was gushing from it madly. What I remember more? My mom racing 100 mph into the ER as the doctor was about to stitch me up screaming at him to stop because she was worried I'd have a big scar over my eye. She demanded that a plastic surgeon do it. It sounds dramatic but I've always wondered if she was right and that I would have had a scar.

[haitian-american family of three]

Oh god. That made me feel sick with worry.
She is so freaking beautiful, even when feeling tragic.

[nini]

This is going to sound strange, but you are lucky they allowed you to hold her down. At our All Childrens Hospital, they don't allow parents to do that for fear of whatever (panicking the child, yelling at the doc, etc.). So some random nurse, in our case, held my 3 month old down. I have no idea how rough it got in there. I have no idea if the nurse "there-there" ed her, or what or how it went down. I'll never know. But after 45 minutes or so, when they gave her back to me, she was in a very strange sleep. She wasn't stirring in my arms. She was out, and pale, and limp, and non-responsive. I asked the same nurse who handed her to me that way if she was ok, and she dismissed me and said oh yeah she's fine. So lesson learned for me! Never again would I agree to leave her side in a hold down situation. She's 3 now and thank goodness I haven't needed to. But anyway, sorry you had to go through it. It is the most stressful thing in the world to have your child sick or injured.

[C]

If you are concerned about scars, here's my for what it's worth anecdote.

My husband did the same thing (bit All The Way through his lower lip) as a child, though older than Caroline.

I don't think he got stitches, as their family was rather the 'deal with it' types, and he was a guy, with less concerns about scars.

There's no scar. You can't even tell. Apparently that area heals well?

[Cathy]

One Tough Wonderbaby. One tough mama. I tend to feel that holding the baby for shots, throat cultures, and other medical procedures is "men's work".

But your story reminded me of when my sister got stitches when she was 4. For some reason, my mom wasn't allowed in the room with her (because I was there too, at age 5? because it was the 70's?) My sister cried and yelled like she meant it. My mother was standing there cheering my sister on, "You tell 'em. Scream louder" quietly to herself.

[Heather P.]

You know thirty-some odd years ago the same thing happened to me.
She's so cute!
I love the Wonderbabies! You have to tell us soon!

[Maria]

Oh my. Poor Caroline. Poor you! That pout is to die for, is it not? My daughter got stitches at the exact same age, only hers were on the upper lip rather than the lower, so there still is a scar than she'll hate me for when she's 14. Caroline's seem to be in a better place.

[Elizabeth_K]

Oh the agony! Having to hold her down! I'm so sorry. Your sweet baby does look so pretty, though ...

[Tracy]

Been there done that! When she was 3, my daughter ran into the aluminum corner of a sliding glass door -- stitches were required and I was the "holder downer", too. I remember her screaming and all the nurses were trying to calm her down by telling her how great she was doing. And then she distinctly and clearly yelled at the top of her lungs, "I AM NOT DOING GREAT!".

Bet the rest of the patients in the ER loved that.

[nina]

Wow. How harrowing for you. Poor little girl. Maybe when she grows up she can be an escapologist or star in one of those action/thriller movies in which the heroine gets away by bending steel bars with Feistyness and Steely Will alone.

I especially feel for you having spent all day in the hospital with my son after he turned blue for no discernible reason at all (other than he enjoys watching me age before his very eyes) and I'm waiting for my stress levels to go down before I can write about it, but the highlights were waiting for FIVE HOURS for him to produce a urine sample and held him down while he screamed and fought wildly as soon as he saw anyone with a stetoscope approaching.

[Gina]

Is it Children's Hospital Week? We found ourselves at the ER last week with a 6-year-old who appeared to have had a stroke (couldn't walk or speak or use his right side). Had I known then that 6-year-olds almost never have strokes I would have been less terrified but that knowledge had yet to be acquired. In any event, turned out to be a severe low blood sugar event (diabetic child) that resolved completely but required a night in the PICU whereupon I counted my blessings. I wouldn't have asked for a diabetic child but it's nothing compared to the very very sick children in the PICU.

Glad all turned out well for Caroline. Such a sweet girl.

[Emily]

I feel so bad for you! I have another story to add. My youngest fell off a kid chair at 16 months and had to get staples in the back of his head. They put the numbing gel on it and wrapped his whole head making it look like he had a horrible head injury. I knew he was OK when I had to follow him around the entire ER as he flirted with all the nurses. Until I had to hold him wrapped in my arms with his arms pinned down trying not to suffocate him with my chest! Note from that day - do NOT let the med student handle the staples on a squirmy toddler; she put in an extra staple that was hanging off the very edge of the wound; I requested that the actual doctor finish the rest.

[Jill]

Similar story here, when BK was three, and we were moving the next day. So we had to go to an ER to get the stitches out after we moved. He has a cute little scar, but the trauma of holding him down is one I will never forget.

A few years later it was the foot. Yikes.

Poor Caroline. I'm betting it won't slow her down though.

[Dara]

Poor baby girl...

[winecat]

I agree with Patrick she is one tough little wonderbaby! She looks sadly bereft in the picture as if suddenly her world has been turned upside down

Hope she heals fast and returns to her normal wonderbaby state soon

[Kristin]

I absolutely love Patrick's response..."She is one tough little wonderbaby," he said. He is such a col kid.

My mom went through the same type of thing when my baby sister was about 2 yrs old. Its amazing how strong those little buggers are.

I am so glad it wasn't any worse.

[sinda]

Oh, ouch!

That post took me straight back to my childhood. At age 3, when a dog bit my lip, I had to get strapped to just such a board to get stitches - I remember it now, 35 (really?) years on.

Later, around 8 or 9, I fell off of the top bunk and drove my top teeth through my bottom ones. I think we just waited that one out though - no er visit that time.

[Diana]

oh, poor caroline and poor you! i have vivid memories of being 6 and seeing my 3 yo brother in a straight jacket getting stitches in his head. i hope i never have to do the restraining- but as both my brother and i had 3 sets of stitches before age 3, i doubt i will get away with it!

[I'm bad]

I parked my SUV in one of those spots. But it's smaller than the SUV I used to have. And there was a bigger SUV in the adjacent spot, closer to the end of the row. I felt ok about it. Because you know, I wouldn't have been the problem. It would have been that other SUV.

[Kelly]

Bless that baby heart. I hope she's back to her old self soon. Poor thing.

[Leslie]

Oh, poor baby! The ER is always so traumatic, even for the less serious things. My son got a second degree burn from hot coffee. I had to hold him down while the nurse tried to put an i.v. in his arm to give him morphine. He fought so hard that despite three tries, she never got it in. I cried the whole time. All that and he didn't even get the good stuff.

[Kate]

For what it's worth, my sister bit through her lip in exactly the same place (she was a bit older -- probably 8 or 9, and it happened 25 years ago when I'm sure the stitching was less refined). Her scar is tiny and totally not visible unless you are really close and specifically looking for it -- hoping the same will be true for Caroline!

[elana]

oh poor caroline! poor you! hope she feels all better very soon.

[kathleen999]

Had to take Zacky to the ER for a bead up the nose. Yes indeed. It took 3 of us to hold him down while the doctor took 1 second to pull the bead out. 3 large adults to hold down one terrified 4 year old weighing 37 lbs. Yes, I aged too. But the good thing about it happening later is that they get bribed with lollipops afterward. And the nice nurse also gave him a Clifford book.

[llcsis]

1.5 yr old son slipped in bathroom and split his head open. 3 yr old daughter held him in back seat, holding bloody cloth to his head while I drove to the ER. He was hysterical at ER, I held him while they cleaned, checked him. They wanted to straightjacket and tie to board and do stitches. I knew I'd have the same scene that you described. I said, well, what if I don't get stitches? They said, the scar will be bigger. It was in his hair, I said I don't care, it's not worth the trauma. Taking him home and putting butterfly bandaids on it (and checking on him a million times). He was fine - 13 now. Every time I see that scar I'm glad I didn't do the stitches. Not to make you feel bad, if it had been his face I probably would have. But hair? pffft! Hugs to Caroline, she is brave and strong!

[Aurelia]

I can't leave the comment I want because I have already had a glass of wine, and it's not coming out the way I intend, that is very kindly and informative like.

To all the people reading this post and to you dear sweet Julia;

All babies regardless of age can be safely medicated for pain or sedation. Evidence based medicine is clear on that. No child EVER has to be held down, and any doc who insists on that should lose their license. Just because it was done in the past doesn't make it right. If that was true, we'd still be eating meat raw and wondering why people died.

Talk to your local hospital, check out their policies, quite often the ER doesn't bother to read them. Print out the pages and stick them in your purse and then God forbid you have another emergency, you will be armed.

All people, regardless of age, have a right to pain free medical treatment as a basic human right.

Off to drink the rest of that wine....

[Aurelia]

Ok, my delete button didn't work, and now i feel like an ass.

Sorry, oh fuckity fuck.

[jen]

We had a lip gashing incident a month or so ago. They put him in a papoose (if that is what Caroline was getting free from, Wonderbaby indeed). It was one of the most awful experiences thus far. They could not sedate him because he had eaten within the last four hours or something like that. They did use dermabond and he will probably have a little scar because, as you said, it doesn't hold well on a face. So glad Caroline is ok!

[Alexis]

I had the same thing happen to me when I was almost two - back in the '80s (yes, I know, I apologize) and I do have a scar. I was running away from my mom so I didn't have to have my diaper changed; I slipped and fell on some huge rocks and I did bite right through. In fact, the scar is slightly lower than Caroline's, but in the same area. It looks like a half moon and it's kinda cute. I've always been proud of it because of my stubbornness and it gives me character. I do, however, have to point it out once in a while because you notice most of my face before the scar (and not in a bad way)

[Sara]

Oh you poor thing! Caroline too, of course.

Like several other posters, I did the same thing at age 7. There is a tiny visible scar right in the spot below my lip where nobody would notice it unless I point it out (which, for some reason, I continue to do), and a larger scar on the inside of my lip which people can only see if I pull my lip down (which I also do if the person hasn't already pleaded for mercy after being forced to look at the outermost scar). It has had absolutely no impact on my life other than giving me a story to tell.

[Liz]

Some people will do anything to avoid finishing their first husband/cat/lamp/Steve story...

I'm so sorry for Steve having it happen on his watch and you never being able to pee again and Caroline discovering the downside of teeth.

[Chris]

Poor Cricket. Poor Mommy. We've had on ER run thus far with g twin - 3 AM strep. You turn into WONDERWOMAN - lasso and all - don't you?

[Karishma]

oh poor cricket! and poor all of you, really! luckily, she won't remember a thing about these, and babies heal magnificently. there probably won't be a scar at all.