mood: 
relieved
music: quiet whir of the fan blades
Well, Saturday had a bit more excitement than we had expected -- or wanted.
Dawn's parents, Noel & Lois, drove in from New Mexico for a visit. (No,
that wasn't the unwanted excitement.) We met them at Panera Bread for
lunch, then went back to our house for more visiting and playing with
Lando. We spent most of the afternoon outside in the yard, watching
Lando play with the neighbor kids (Brooke, Brock, and Nick). Actually,
we spent a bit *too* much time outside, because we all got a little
sunburned.
The unwanted excitement came when something
happened and Lando got hurt. As in "drive to the Emergency Room" hurt.
I was in the garage, making a futile attempt at cleaning it up, and
Dawn was inside talking with her parents. Then I heard Brooke asking
Lando what was wrong and was he alright. Lando was crying and holding
his right arm.
I wasn't sure what had happened, but I knew that earlier Lando had been
climbing over the top of Brooke (who was sitting on this small
trampoline of ours), so I figured it was likely that he had fallen off
and landed on his arm.
My suspicion was a sprained or broken
wrist, so I sent the kids home and carried Lando into the house. I sat
for a couple of minutes holding Lando in my lap while we examined his
arm and waited to see whether it would stop hurting.
It didn't.
So it was off to the Emergency Room! Actually, it was off to Memorial
ExpressCARE, which is closer and generally faster. Lando assured us
that he didn't need to go to the doctor. He said that it would be all
better in 2 days. Later he changed his prognosis and said that it would
be all better in 2 hours. However, he did not change his recommendation against going to the doctor.
We went anyway.
When we asked Lando what happened, he said (version #1) that he tripped on a
stick and fell down. Dawn then told him that when she was young, she
was roller skating and the roller skates hit a rock, causing her to
fall and break her wrist. Lando then changed his story and said
(version #2) that he had tripped on a rock and fell down. We corrected
him, but he insisted that, no, it was a rock. (We live in central
Illinois. We don't have any rocks here. We have to import rocks from exotic places like Tennessee.)
So we got to ExpressCARE and the nurse began to examine him. Lando was
generally fine, except when his arm was moved, at which point he
started crying again. When the nurse asked him where it hurt and
pointed at his wrist, he told her that (version #1) the wrist was what
hurt. When she pointed at his elbow, he stuck to his story -- wrist.
Later, the doctor came him and asked him where it hurt, pointing to his
wrist and then his elbow. Lando insisted (version #2) that it was the
elbow that hurt. I told the doctor that Lando had told that nurse that
it was his wrist that hurt.
So the doctor said that Lando's
wrist would need to be X-rayed. Lando had 2 questions about this: (1)
Would he have to get a shot? and (2) Would it be loud? (Lando is very
afraid of loud noises. Whenever we run the vacuum cleaner, we warn
Lando so that he can barricade himself in his bedroom.)
Reassured that getting an X-ray would involve neither needles nor noises, we went
off with the X-ray tech. I'd been holding Lando in my lap the entire
time, from when we got out of the car until we entered the X-ray lab.
The tech said that I could continue to hold him, and while I was doing
so she also had me support one end of the X-ray film under Lando's
wrist -- a rather precarious balancing act! Lando was fine with the
first exposure. Then the tech rotated his wrist at a 45 degree angle
for the second exposure, which caused Lando to cry a bit. Then she
rotated his wrist at a 90 degree angle for the third exposure, which
Lando really didn't like!
Worse yet, when she checked the exposures, she found that we needed to
redo the third one. Poor guy! At last it was all over and I carried
Lando back to the doctor's office.
When the doctor came in, he
said that he couldn't see anything broken on the X-rays, but that he
wasn't an expert at reading the X-rays of kids as young as Lando, so he
would have to send them to Memorial to be read.
Then the doctor
examined Lando's arm again, and this time came to the conclusion that
version #2 of Lando's story was the correct one -- it was Lando's elbow
that was really hurting, not the wrist.
They hadn't X-rayed the elbow.
*sigh*
When we told Lando that we were going to have to do more X-rays, he
again cried and asked us 2 questions: (1) Would he have to get a shot?
and (2) Would it be loud? (I would have thought that "Will it hurt?"
would have ranked higher on the list of questions. I guess that just
shows that I'm not a 3-year-old.)
I carried Lando back to the X-ray lab, but this time he needed to be lying down on the (cold hard metal) table. Lando was not
happy about this! Dawn and I both donned lead-lined aprons, and while
Dawn tried to hold his arm still, I struggled to hold his legs and the
rest of his body down. As before, there were 3 exposures -- prone, 45
degree angle, and 90 degree angle. And as before he really didn't like the 90 degree angle one!
After we were done, however, the X-ray tech said that, when she rotated his
arm for the 90 degree angle shot, she felt something pop, like perhaps
a bone in his elbow had popped back into place.
Could it be that Lando had nursemaid's elbow?
What a relief that would be! Lando had been to the E.R. before with
nursemaid's elbow, back when he was 18 months old. The name comes from
someone (e.g. the child's nursemaid) grabbing onto the child's arm to
stop them from running away or to lift them up, at which point a bone
in the elbow pops out of its socket, due to young children having
ligaments that are extremely flexible.
Then the X-ray tech handed Lando a toy -- and Lando reached out with his injured right arm to take it!
*Phew!*
To say that I was relieved is an understatement. There's nothing quite
like the feeling of holding your young son in your lap while he's in
pain and there's nothing you
can do about it. (Plus, I was dreading the prospect of weeks of Lando
with his wrist and/or arm in a cast or sling. Lando is Mister Energy,
and telling him that he couldn't use his right hand for a few weeks was
not appealing!)
When Lando had nursemaid's elbow before, we
took him to the E.R. The doctor who examined him then recognized what
was wrong, held Lando's arm in his hands, did a little maneuver, and instantly
Lando stopped crying! It was amazing! No X-rays required or anything. I
suppose it's possible that if we had taken Lando to the E.R. rather
than to Memorial ExpressCARE, we might have gotten a doctor who
recognized the symptoms and was able to take care of them sooner. Who
knows?
We still don't know what really caused it. One
possibility is that Lando tripped over a stick and fell, as he said,
then one of the kids tried to lift him back up by pulling on his arm.
Another possibility is that one of the kids tried to stop Lando from
running by grabbing his arm and then Lando pulled free, tripped, and
fell. We'll probably never know for sure.
When we got home, the
neighbor kids' dad came over to find out what happened and whether his
kids were responsible. He said that all he knew was that as soon as he
got home, his kids were telling him that Lando got hurt while playing
with them. :-) I assured him that Lando was okay and explained my
theories about what might have happened. I'm sure none of them
deliberately hurt Lando, and Lando tends to be enough of a rough and
tumble kid that it wouldn't surprise me at all if one of the kids tried
to grab Lando by the arm (pop!) or pull him back up after he fell
(pop!).
In any case, that was the big unwanted excitement of the weekend!
tired
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