Ouchies!
by PolarBear on February 9th, 2007
Oh what an awful evening.
The girl decided that, in spite of catching crap for it every time, she could jump up and down and dance on the couch. We were upstairs and heard a crash, and rushed downstairs to find she had bounced herself right off the end and through the top of the glass end table.
Mama grabbed her foot, which was bleeding, while I went hunting for a towel. I had Anjohli get down on the couch, which she was already bleeding all over, and had Mama raise her foot above her heart and keep pressure on it. After a few minutes of pressure, I took a look at things 
and decided she was probably going to need patching up. I told Butterfly we would have to go get stitches or maybe just steri-strips put on it at the hospital so they could make sure there was no glass left inside. She burst into tears and said she was scared of stitches and she didn’t need the hospital. I told her, they might even just glue it or something but I wasn’t sure, but I was absolutely sure she had to go to the hospital.
We got the bleeding virtually stopped and while Mama prepared the vehicle and got the boy into his seat, I consoled the girl. I then asked her if she 
wanted a picture of her toe so later she could show people what happened, and she thought that would be cool. I took a picture of the cut on her big toe for her… and here it is.
She didn’t want to go to the hospital but I scooped her up in my arms and carried her out. 6-year-olds are heavy, I’ll tell you… I cradled her in my arms all the way to the hospital, and by the time we got inside to the triage nurse, she was actually quite calm. Of course, we had to get in the car and drive through a blizzard and all she had on was a dress (and her coat) , with no shoe and no way to put anything on her, so she was a little chilly. She lay down across a chair with her toe up, and after 10 minutes they brought us around to treat her “Level 4 laceration”.
As usual we ended up waiting in the treatment room for about 40 minutes before anyone looked. A really nice resident finally came in and gently checked over her toe, cleaned out a few remaining bits of glass, irrigated the cut to be sure and asked the girl if she was tough enough for some stitches. He then said, maybe we can get away without stitches and asked Butterfly if she would like them to glue it instead. He asked his attending to look at her toe and he agreed it was a wound that was suitable to glue. So, the opened up the Medical Krazy Glue and stuck her toe together, put on some steri-strips to strengthen it, and put on a really nice dressing.
We finally got home around 9:40pm after picking up some frozen pizzas, since the whole evening had been more or less absorbed. The doctor had told her to stay off her toe, but as usual with kids, as soon as we were home and safe she had to start walking around all over the place. She is supposed to keep the dressing on and stay off it for 48 hours. We may have to tie her down tomorrow.
Anyway, we are very glad it wasn’t worse… it could have been really serious if she had landed differently, so we were all lucky. Good thing the only permanent damage is the end table, which has 3 levels and the top one is now in a million bits in the garbage.
She took some kids’ acetaminophen and has finally gone to sleep. With everything going on the stress level is really high here right now, so it is a relief to be getting to bed.
Apologies
by PolarBear on February 7th, 2007
Sorry for no updates. We’ve been going a little crazy… and we just got this up in our own space.
Hopefully things will be more normal soon. First – we need a new look for this blah page. And soon, we’ll get back into it.
*Update* Got a better look for now but the image handling is iffy. Sorry, we’ll keep at it. We also have some “retroactive” posts to make back through the holidays and Hallowe’en, watch the archives as they appear.