Staples

Oy!  What a morning.  I think the adrenaline has finally subsided.  Have you ever seen blood gushing from your kid's HEAD?!  Okay, gushing is a bit too strong of a word.  But seriously, there was an inch long open gash in my daughter's head this morning.  Talk about heart stopping!  

I kind of freaked out at first, but thankfully big J was there to snap me out of it quickly.  The kids fall all the time and so you expect the bumps, scratches, and bruises, but the open head wound was a first for our family.  

So we start applying pressure to stop the bleeding while trying to figure out the whole "what do we do now?" thing.  I carry E to the van and get her strapped in.  By that point she had calmed down considerably.  That gave us a breather and I went back inside to get the phone to call the doctor.  They wanted to see her of course, but after asking their routine questions, reassured me that she was fine.  (At this point E is talking and smiling like normal.)  So I get an appt and take her in.  Again, I am soooo glad big J was still at home.  His company is very understanding and so he just notified his company that he was going to work from home this morning.  Baby R was napping and J is fairly easy to keep track of when it is just him, so big J was actually able to get some work done.

Back to E and the doctor's visit.  She stood on the scale for the first time (27.5 lbs) and we then went to a room.  The nurse cleaned up the gash with some kind of water solution.  E didn't even flinch!  She just smiled and said "it's cold."  So now the wound is all cleaned up and I can REALLY see this gaping hole in my daughter's head.  That is something that should NOT be seen!  So then the nurse explains to me how the doctor will be handling the wound - staples.  Sounds lovely, right?  They put some numbing gel on her head first and then the doctor comes in with this little stapler thing.  I'm thinking, "oh my poor baby!"  She still doesn't flinch!  4 little staples in her pretty little head.  

So then all that is over with and the doctor looks at me and says "we need to talk about vaccinations."  Should have seen that one coming!  We had stopped doing them a while back and recently were feeling ready to start them back up.  Turns out this was an excellent opportunity!  One of the shots she was missing was the 4th DTaP (tetanus).  So she ended up getting that while we were there, too.  Okay so she did flinch for that, but still no tears!  She was an amazing patient.  And quite happy to have a sparkly band-aid and a dinosaur sticker (that she chose).  

In about a week we'll go back to have the staples removed and other than that, she's good to go.  Crazy.  Another new adventure to add to the parent roster.  Oh and now we have a nice print-out about things to look for after a head trauma.  I think I'll be praying that we don't need to reference it in the future.