Tag: ‘emergency room’ · TangleBones
Kellie’s in the hospital
For those that don’t know, my wife had to go to the emergency room on Saturday and will be staying in the hospital for at least a week while she undergoes treatment for pneumonia. Both of her lungs are pretty full of gunk and the doctors are treating her with “aggressive” antibiotics. We’re all fine, but busy. See you next week.
UPDATE 3/22/2006: And 99 hours later, she’s been discharged. Still sickly, but home. Thanks for the encouragement.
Jared’s second set of stitches
Just so that I don’t have to repeat this story any more, and thereby give myself the willies, I’m going to let you all know about Jared’s visit to the emergency room this past weekend. There will be no pictures in this entry because YOU CAN’T HANDLE IT. Also, there will be gruesome details along the way – if you read past this warning, it’s your own fault.
Also, this story is a lot like this one about his last trip to the emergency room, minus the bits about keyboards, but the experience was much more traumatic. If the picture from that story makes you queasy, thank your lucky stars that I’m not showing you any pictures from this one.
On Saturday morning I was asleep in bed in my basement. Why the basement? Because that’s where you sleep when you give up the master bedroom in your house to your wife’s grandmother. (You hear that Mom? Now who’s the nicest guy in the world?) But anyway, I awoke to hear Jared yelling from the living room and thought, “I need to sleep for just a few minutes more – he can wait” and started to go back to sleep. You see, Jared yells a lot in the morning. TV is turned off? Yell at it! Computer is in standby? Yell at it! So we’re pretty casual about that sort of thing.
But then he rang the doorbell. You see, when sleeping in the basement, a place you don’t want your son wandering around, you have to buy a doorbell so that he can alert you that he wants you to come help him out. So I realized that if I didn’t go help him out, he’d wake his mother up, and she needs her rest. So I ran up the stairs and asked Jared what the problem was. He was crying pitifully and holding his shirt up with one hand and pointing at his stomach saying, “I’m hurt. I need a bandaid.”
In our house we’ve discovered that it’s easier to buy a $3 pack of novelty kids bandaids that you don’t mind giving out like stickers than to argue with a small child about exactly how injured their knee has to be to earn a bandaid. So I told Jared that I’d get him a bandaid. He followed me into the kitchen where I lifted him onto the counter and grabbed a Dora bandaid. When I started to put it on his stomach, he said, “No – over here” and tried to look over his shoulder. It was at that point that I woke up.
You see, even though I get up before the sun comes up most days, my eyes don’t really open until I’ve gotten a soda and sat down to read my newsfeeds. So it was only when I was actually stunned into wakefulness by the sight of a hole in Jared’s back that I realized that he had blood smeared down one side of his face and all over his left hand.
On his back, in the hip/love handle region, was what looked like a horizontal pool of blood surrounded by
a ragged tear. The oh-so-white skin of his back was ripped and puffed out in an area a little bigger than a quarter but smaller than a half-dollar. Knowing that it would take two adults to get him patched up enough to go to the hospital, I immediately yelled for Kellie to come help me.
Of course, now that Kellie was coming, I had to do something about all of the blood. My wife is one tough woman, but the sight of blood sends her reeling. So I grabbed some paper towels, wet one of them, folded up a couple more, and tried to staunch the blood flow with one hand while cleaning Jared and the countertop with the other.
When Kellie walked in I explained that Jared was going to need stitches again, gave her an idea of what was going on and set her some tasks. This is how our family deals with a crisis: I give orders and everybody else tries not to faint from the sight of the blood. It works pretty well. Kellie got some gauze pads and tape so that we could keep the wound covered and then gave Jared his morning medicine while I got dressed.
At this point, Kellie went up to his room to get his socks and shoes, and saw that his TV was out of place. She reasoned that he’d been turning on his TV and fell out of bed onto an upside-down lego table. The leg of the table ends in a hard hollow plastic cylinder (this is going to be gross – toughen up, or bail out) that was full of fatty tissue as though it were an apple corer or something. There was nothing sharp about it which meant that he must have fallen incredibly hard to break the skin and do as much damage as he did.
Once Jared was ready to go to the hospital, he stopped crying completely and seemed pretty happy about the whole thing. He sat still in the car, was good waiting at the emergency room front desk, and walked and talked through the whole thing as if there were nothing wrong.
Once we got through triage (“My son needs stitches.” “I’m going to need to look at the wound…[takes tiniest peek – gasps} oh yeah, that needs stitches.”), Jared sat happily in the waiting area and played with his video games.
Well, a few tense minutes went by, and Jared didn’t get any mellower. They got some local anesthetic loaded into a syringe and squirted it around the inside and outside of the wound, then we set to work. Two nurses and I pinned Jared down while he struggled. People kept saying silly things like, “If we just pin him this way, he won’t be able to move,” and smart things like, “Jesus, he’s strong.” Didn’t I mention that before we started? You’d think these doctors had never treated a kryptonian kid before.
In the middle of all this, I felt really bad for Jared. Most people would be freaked out in a situation like this, but Jared, on top of being freaked out and in intense pain (since I don’t think the painkillers ever kicked in while we were at the hospital) was completely confused about what was going on. I started apologizing to Jared, then realized how bad that sounded under the circumstances: “I’m so sorry Jared… in the sense that I’m sorry for the situation, and in no way taking the blame for what happened… I mean, I wasn’t even there – not that I should have been there, it’s not like I’m neglectful…” Let’s just say that I’m lucky that we got to leave together.
The grossest part of the procedure (don’t wuss out on me now!) was when the doctor tried to clean up the area prior to stitching so that she could see what she was doing and I had to watch little pieces of fatty tissue breaking away and rolling down his back. Later I got to clean those same pieces out of the table leg that he impaled himself on. I’ll never feel clean again.
After a few tense minutes of Jared moving us all around the table (and never ever getting mellow), the doctor finished up and I got to take a look at her work. Meaning the wound, I said, “That’s pretty ugly,” but the doctor must have thought I meant the stitches because she came back with, “he didn’t give me a lot to work with.” They gave us some bandages and packets of medicinal goop to apply to the wound and sent us out with directions to see a doctor in 10 days.
Their other instruction was to keep Jared from moving around too much so that the wound wouldn’t open up or shift around. Heh. I felt like saying, “Three different medications and years of counseling haven’t settled this boy down once in 6 years – exactly what would you have me do” but then they said, “you know, do your best” and I figured that they understood at least something of what we would be going through.
The wound itself, once the doctor had fished all the pieces out of the hole and stitched it all together, is vaguely C-shaped. Because it’s a tear instead of a cut, it’s ragged and disgusting. It looks like something out of a horror movie. I get the feeling that this scar isn’t going to be as clean and pink and cute as his last one.
About 2 hours after we got home, the sedative kicked in and Jared fell asleep. By Sunday, the whole area around the bandaid was one big bruise and he didn’t want us touching or even looking at it. Changing the bandaid is pretty hard and I can only hope that the bruising goes down quickly.
Questions? Hey, where’d everybody go? Wusses.