(Hopefully not very) scarred for life

[beetiger]

I could probably tell this story much more dramatically and in detail, and I may later, but I'm not feeling up for it now, so just the basics.

projectmothra decided to run toward the big metal bench in front of Chili's after lunch today, and tripped and whacked himself into it, and when I picked him up he was screaming and dripping blood down over his eye and face. It wasn't as bad as i thought initially -- once I got him to nurse and calm down, and I wiped a lot of blood out of the way, I was able to see that he hadn't actually hurt his eye, but that he'd split his eyebrow open fairly deeply. So instead of the 3rd birthday party we were supposed to be at this afternoon, we ended up in the emergency room.

Rhys has got a lidocaine-swollen eye and eight stiches now, and he's acting fairly cheerful, playing games with his dad on the computer. The stitch-getting was much worse than the initial injury, or course. I've heard other moms nursing toddlers that having that as a tool in the emergency room was helpful, and now having experienced that, I definitely agree.

I'm still kind of freaked out, but everything's really pretty much okay. Hopefully if I am meticulous about keeping the area sunsceened for the next while, he won't have too much scarring, and if he ends up with bushy eyebrows like his mom they will likely mostly cover the scar in any case.

So much for getting his 2-year-old portraits done tomorrow, though.

Comments

It's the age.

[allessindra.livejournal.com]

No, really.

At age 2, my Elder Child was climbing up on a pile of cloth to look out a window at something. *on her way back down* the cloth slide and she faceplanted onto a radiator -- the old fashioned kind, with the ?rings of ornate tubing that are only ever *vaguely* pointed at the top, and those points are rounded? I'm sure if I tried hard I could find a picture of what I mean, but she succeeded in splitting her forehead open and had two sets of stitches, one 'deep' and one surface. I seem to remember 5 total, but I don't remember how many were where. She still has the scar, and we joke that the only problem with it is that it's *not* a lightning-bolt shape.

The Younger Child, approximate age 2, was with my husband at a party and was standing next to a low-coffee table, reaching for the veggie plate. Nice, rounded edges, about chest-to-waist height on the child. Apparently, no one was watching him for maybe three seconds, because no one saw *how* he succeeded in splitting open the skin on the arch of the cheekbone -- it was just sudden screaming and blood. Fortunately, there was a plastic-surgeon-specialized doctor in the ER that night, who was able to give the tiny tight neat stitches to avoid scarring.

Some time later we took him to his doctor to have the stitches out; I've never met a more *useless* doctor. She freaks out if a child cries! As in, "make him stop, make him stop, I can't deal with it, I can't take these out go back where htey were put in!" If the woman wasn't well trained to our idiosyncracies I'd have left.

Not a week after he had those out, finally -- at the local not-an-emergency-room place -- my Husband and I were together during the day on a school day, I can't remember why at the moment, wiht Younger Child along -- possibly an IEP meeting. We went to a local 'indoor play space taht wasn't mcdonalds' to get food and let Younger Child run around. We'd just finished paying (and kidlet had run ahead to go play) and we were getting food, when he was suddenly screaming. And bleeding. He'd apparently run into the air-hockey table, and split the skin on his eyebrow. on the opposite side of his face. And, so, back to get more stitches...

It really is the age.