Early Morning Emergency Room Visits Are No Fun
The boys fall down about a hundred times a day. Each time, we pick them up and tell them that they are okay and send them off to play again. On Sunday morning, Aiden was running down the hall when he fell. He was on the floor crying, so I picked him up from behind and said, “You’re okay, buddy”. By the time I got him up on his feet, Chrissy looked at him and then at me and carefully said, “No, he’s not okay”.
Aiden had smacked his head on the corner of the wall when he went down. This left a one-inch gash on his forehead. It looked like a small scratch at first, but it began to widen and deepen. I guess the skin on your forehead is under a lot of tension. It didn’t really bleed much, but it looked bad. Chrissy said that we would have to take him to the emergency room for stitches. And by a we, she meant me.
I got Aiden to the hospital pretty quickly, it’s not too far away, and we were there by about quarter till nine. Once we got checked in, we had to wait a while in the waiting room for a doctor to see us. The worst part was the waiting, but I suppose that the doctor needed to see other patients in the ER besides us. The nurse that checked us in was very nice and she gave Aiden a coloring book and some crayons.
Once we saw the doctor, he said that Aiden would require three stitches in his forehead. Normally, they don’t give anesthesia to people with stitches, but for little kids they will give them a cream that will numb the area. Aiden got his wound cleaned and bandaged and then they put on the topical cream. About twenty minutes later, the nurses came back to strap Aiden in.
In order to give him the stitches, they had to tie him down to a board. They called it “giving him a big hug” but Aiden called it “wrapped up like a mummy”. Once he was a immobilized, they injected Lidocaine around the cut. This may have been the scariest moment ever for me as a parent. The needle was a very thin gauge, and it would bend instead of inserting. On top of that, Aiden was trying to turn his head away and would often drive the needle deeper into his skin in his direction.
Thankfully it didn’t take much longer, and the doctor started suturing. Although the area should have been numb, Aiden screamed like he could feel everything. I was watching the entire time and I was ready to sit down after about two minutes. There were only three stitches, and I was happy when it was done. The worst was over inside of five minutes. Once they let Aiden out of his restraints, he seemed fine. I don’t think that he could even feel his head after that.
The nurses bandaged Aiden up and gave him a popsicle and more stickers. Then we got some instructions on how to care for the stitches, and we were ready to go. All told, we were in the ER for about two hours. From prior experience, I think that we were lucky to have gotten out that quickly. But everyone was very nice and the experience wasn’t nearly as horrible as one would expect a gaping head wound to be.
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