On Monday afternoon Wilder and I went to the grocery and then to a moms meetup at one of the local parks. As you know I've had little to no success making friends through these meetups but I keep going because at least it gives Wilder other kids to play with. Anyway, at this meetup I had actually gotten involved in a conversation with two of the other moms (!). We were talking while the kids ran around when suddenly I looked over just in time to see Wilder run toward the steps to the slide, trip on the rubber matting of the play area, and fall hitting his chin on the bottom metal step.
I didn't rush over right away because usually when he falls he just pops right back up and keeps going, but when he didn't jump up after a couple of seconds I scooped him up as he started to cry and began to try to comfort him. I looked at his mouth thinking he had surely lost a couple of teeth but saw no damage at first. Then I started to see blood coming from somewhere and I lifted his chin up and almost passed out right then and there. He had about a two inch gash across the bottom of his chin and it was bleeding pretty badly.
I showed the other moms and we examined it to see if we thought it needed stitches. I definitely didn't think it could be held closed with a butterfly bandage and wasn't sure he would leave one of those on anyway so they pointed me in the direction of the closest emergency room. In the 3-4 minutes it took me to pick Wilder up, assess the damage, and get him into the car, he stopped crying and began acting like everything was perfectly normal and like he didn't have gobs of blood down the front of his sweatshirt. On the way to the hospital he was laughing and joking around and I kept wondering if we really did need to go in. By the time we parked at the ER it had stopped bleeding so I did another quick check to see how bad it was. It wasn't deep but I could see tiny bits of tissue and it was pretty long so I went ahead and took him in.
They didn't have any rooms available of course so we waited for about an hour and a half in the waiting room. Luckily I always have an assortment of books and trucks in the car so we grabbed a few of those and between those, the flash card app on my phone, and pointing out every single thing he knew around the waiting room he was successfully occupied until we got into a room. We finally got a room but then we sat in there for another hour before the doctor made it in to see us. The whole time Wilder was acting like there was nothing wrong, he never mentioned his chin or acted like it bothered him, so I guess they deemed us the lowest priority emergency.
I was pretty anxious about trying to entertain him in the room but I shouldn't have worried -- he snuggled up on the bed with me and made me read the same two books over and over and over. Between books he would call out stuff he saw around the room: clock -- tick tock tick tock, gloves, trash can, and he pointed at the otoscope (had to look up that word, it's the thing they look in your ears/throat with) and said ears (I couldn't believe he remembered that from his last checkup four months ago). He was fascinated by all the new stuff there was to look at and he gobbles up new experiences like a dessert so it was actually not that difficult to keep him occupied.
Finally the doctor came in, cleaned off his chin, and glued it closed, which took all of two minutes after those hours of waiting! She was amazed by how calm and cooperative he was and she gave him two stickers and a little stuffed dog, which he was thrilled with and definitely deserved. So that was our first emergency room experience. I pray that we don't have any, ok let's be realistic, many more in our future and if we do that they are all as easy and non-urgent as the first. When Paul got home that night Wilder had to tell him alllll about every single thing that he saw or that the doctors and nurses did. He was, dare I say it, so excited (?!) about the whole thing haha! And he's healing up well and his chin doesn't seem to be bothering him too much so that's a relief. I'm so proud of my brave, easy-going boy!
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