Camden is going for some kind of record in our family, a bad kind of record, most trips to the ER in a single year. So far he has gone twice this year, which is two times more than any of our other kids!
Last Friday the kids and I were visiting my parents in Saratoga Springs. Camden had been playing in the basement with the other kids and my mom. My mom brought him up to change his diaper and give him a bath because it was close to bed time (we weren't planning on staying the night, just getting the kids all set for bed before we left so we could go straight to bed when we got home). Camden saw me when he got to the top of the stairs, ran to me and gave me a hug around my legs. Then, as he turned around to run back to Grandma, he tripped over my feet and did a face plant into the bottom of the wood banister, right into the sharp point of a square shaped piece of wood at the bottom of the rail.
I was right there so I picked him up right away and he cried (no fainting this time) for a couple minutes and then he stopped crying wanted to snuggle with his sad eyes and shuddering breath. He didn't want me to clean the cut so I couldn't get a very good look at it. I was debating giving him a bath before deciding if I should take him into the Instacare, but my brother Richard looked up the closest Instacare hours and they were closing in 20 minutes. So I decided to just leave right away and let them take a look at it. Since it was on his face I had a suspicion they would send me to the ER if he needed stitches anyway...
I made it to the Instacare ten minutes before closing. They cleaned up his cut a bit, and took a look at it and said because of the shape they wanted me to take him into the ER instead.
So I took Camden to the ER where we were seen right away. The doctor there was hoping he could just glue the cut since it was short enough to glue, but after looking at it more closely he said he would have to do stitches. The cut was sort of a Y shape and the skin in between the V part of the cut had come detached and would need to be sutured. The doctor told us the nurse would put a numbing agent on the cut and the doctor would come back in 20 minutes to do the stitches. The nurse had to tape a gauze with the liquid numbing agent mustache-style onto Camden's face because Camden didn't want me holding the gauze onto his face.
He pretty much forgot about it though after we tapped it onto his face.
30 minutes later the nurse came back and put more numbing stuff on the gauze and said the doctor was with some other patients, but that he (the nurse) felt like 45 minutes was a more accurate time of how long the numbing agent would need to sit to get nice and numb anyway.
Camden and I took selfies, sang songs, named all the pictures on the walls in the pediatric room they had put us in, watched Youtube videos on my phone, and played children's games on my phone. They had put a monitor on Camden's foot, so he wasn't able to get up and run around the room. Camden found that really, really annoying. He was stuck sitting on the hospital bed and I was stuck sitting there next to him to make sure he didn't move. The nurse came in a few times to check on us, but no doctor. It was after all the ER, so I wasn't really expecting things to happen quickly if we weren't urgent.
Finally, after an hour and half in the room, Camden was completely exhausted. It was about 10:30 p.m. and waaay past his bedtime. He stopped trying to move around on the bed and snuggled up to me and started to fall asleep. Just as his eyes were drooping close, the doctor, the nurse, and a resident came in to do the stitches. As they prepped Camden fell fast asleep, poor guy, for about two minutes. He woke up as we moved him into place for the doctor to stitch him up.
They wrapped him up in a sheet like a burrito to keep his hands still. The nurse held his head, the resident held his torso, and I held his feet. The doctor said Camden didn't seem to feel the doctor pricking at Camden's skin so he must be numb. Still, Camden hated that he was being held down and that people were doing something on his face.
He cried and squirmed the whole time, with occasional shouts of "Mama!" I tried to talk to him, but it didn't do much good. At least I knew he was mad and not so much hurting from the stitches since he couldn't feel it. But he was a strong little boy! My arms were shaking afterwards from the effort it took to hold his legs still.
He got seven stitches and they had to cut away a tiny bit of the skin at the tip of the V on the cut since the skin there was dying and turning black. He didn't really bruise that day, but the next day as the day went on he started looking more and more black and blue. He's got a black eye now and bruising above the cut from where his face hit the spindle of the banister.
The bloody pictures:
We took lots of selfies.
He fell asleep 30 seconds after I buckled him into his car seat at 11:00 p.m.
The next morning
Playing outside the next morning
He was grumpy all morning because he woke up at his normal time but went to bed much later than normal.
You can see more bruising today.
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