Yes, I know I've been absent from this blog for ages. I apologize. But I hope any readers will forgive me when they find out why I've been absent from my blog. So here goes. I'll try to keep it shorter to read than it felt to live...
I was minding my own business last Wednesday, standing in line at the post office to buy stamps for my wedding invitations, when my cell phone rang. It was my son's school.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Amy, it's Denise (school principal)," she said, in an impossibly calm and soothing voice. "Everything's fine, but we think your son might have a broken arm."
Cue me taking a solid three seconds to compute what she was saying and formulate words. But I managed to get it together and head for the car.
When I got there, in an admittedly disheveled and somewhat frantic state, I found him with an obviously deformed arm, whimpering in pain. He had fallen off the "big slide" on the school's playground, it seems -- a fall, I was later told, of around seven feet.
A few moments after I arrived, the school's emergency responder (a teacher who was, incidentally, a former EMT) came in to scope out the scene and recommended taking him to the hospital by ambulance so that he could be seen much faster than if we drove over by ourselves.
I admit that, as much as I hated to see my son hurting, my immediate response was that that seemed overkill. My brothers had had several broken bones in their youths, and the only time an ambulance was required was the time my brother broke it so badly that he passed out from the pain whenever he was moved in any way. But I took his advice and let him make the call for the ambulance.
I'll go ahead and say it now -- he was totally right.
When we got there, they had a room waiting for him and a pediatrician in there within seconds to order an IV and a dose of morphine for my poor little guy. The x-ray was there within 30 minutes, and the orthopedist right behind. The haste, it turns out, was warranted because my son's upper arm bone was broken and displaced in such a way that the bone was pressing down on important nerves and blood vessels in his arm. The pulse in his wrist was present but weak, and he was losing feeling in some of his fingers. He needed surgery pronto to keep things from getting really bad.
He fell around 4:00 in the afternoon. We were in the ER a little before 5:30, and my son was wheeled into surgery by 8:00. They put his bone back together and inserted three pins to keep it that way and then wrapped him up in the camouflage cast he had managed to ask for even while totally doped up on morphine.
I was, as you can probably imagine, stressed and rather tearful, though I worked hard to hide that from him. But it got me wondering, how in the world do parents deal with real crises? This was a broken arm, for heaven's sake. Granted, it was a badly broken arm, a serious injury that's going to take some serious care for a while, but it wasn't life threatening or anything.
I've got a childhood friend whose son has leukemia. They're dealing with constant crises, every day, for years. I don't know how they keep it together except that, well, that's just what you do when you're a parent.
But back at Greenville Memorial in the midst of our minor calamity, my son spent the night in the hospital and was sent home Thursday afternoon. Life since then has posed new and ever-changing challenges (more on that later), but I remain glad that, in the end, he's just fine.
So with this tale, am I forgiven for having been absent? I think I can get a doctor's excuse if I need one.
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