Life on the mend and the not-so-single-mom

After we got through the trauma of the break and the surgery and the hospital stay, my son and I headed home for what will be our rather inconvenient, uncomfortable, out-of-sorts life for the next several weeks. The good news is that he broke his left arm and he's right-handed. The bad news is that really means only that he can write and eat reasonably well, leaving a whole world of tasks that are suddenly challenges.

Because of the location of his break and the pins in his elbow (lots of padding around them and then cast), my son's cast is really big. No, I mean freaking HUGE when compared to his body. (See photo, below, that I snapped the other day in the car.)

Given the obvious limitations, let me tell you about a few things that may not have immediately crossed your mind but that have proven to be conundrums, either large or small:

1. Little boy shirt sleeves aren't made to go around a cast this size. The options we've come across thus far have been tank tops (as he's wearing here), which thankfully have larger sleeve openings; too big t-shirts; and just giving up and ripping the seams out of existing shirts. So far I've managed to keep it to the first two options, although it did entail buying him a couple new oversized shirts because...

2. School uniforms falls into the category of clothes that don't fit. His uniforms shirts are all polos with sleeves that certainly won't stretch to accommodate this. He's allowed to wear school t-shirts on Fridays, but only Fridays, so I had to buy a couple extra t-shirts from the school bookstore and ask permission for him to wear them every day. It was happily granted, but still another hurdle.

3. Children who can't bend their elbows in any way can't reach their own pants button and zipper. Cue the search for every pair of elastic waist pants I could dig out of his drawers (and, again, permission to wear them to school in lieu of the standard khakis). Other things on the no-can-do list: tying shoes, putting toothpaste on toothbrush and playing with his Nintendo DS (which would otherwise have been an invaluable resource in staving off the inevitable boredom of his activity restrictions).

4. Nerve damage, which may take months or longer to heal, means my son has little sensation and almost no dexterity in his thumb or forefinger -- and, to a lesser extent, his middle finger. This means that even things he can reach, he can't grasp or manipulate very well. No more Ziploc baggies or Tupperware containers for lunch or snacks -- he can't open them. I bought one of those containers with divided compartments inside and a snap-on lid with handles that he can open with one hand.

5. He can't buckle his seat belt one-handed. I can't tell you how many times over the past week I have hopped in the car and prepared to throw it in reverse when my son has piped up from the back seat, "Mom, I'm not buckled." He's been buckling himself in for so long that I just forget that I'm back to seat belt duty for the time being.

6. Sleep is tortured and elusive. The longest stretch of sleep either of us has gotten since he broke his arm was a luxurious 4 1/2 hours last night. Though he's hurting very little anymore during the day, he wakes all night long complaining of pain. I don't know if lying down makes it worse for some reason or if his 5-year-old brain simply translates discomfort as pain (and surely trying to sleep with that thing on your arm is the very definition of discomfort) or what, but we are just NOT getting much sleep. And when he's had medication already, I can't give him more, leaving him crying and whimpering and me helpless and fraught. It's been a delight.

On the plus side, kids adapt so well and so quickly. He can get his pants up and down one-handed and can go the bathroom alone. He can eat and drink just fine as long as I make sure things are cut up for him. And he can operate a remote control. As much as I normally try to steer him away from the TV, I confess that policy has gone out the window for the duration of this injury. The boy needs something to keep from dying of boredom, and if that something's a few episodes of "Scooby Doo," it ain't the end of the world.

The long absence, the long night and the not-so-single mom

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.

Another Disney question

A few entries ago, I blogged about my son asking some difficult questions related to "The Lion King." It seems now that is not the only Disney movie that's going to elicit questions from my 5 year old's ever-growing and endlessly inquisitive mind. The more he grasps, the less he's watching simply for the pretty configuration of lights and sound emanating from the TV.

Which leads us to this latest practically unanswerable question. He was watching "Aladdin" the other day, and the scene where the genie, in bee form, imitates a plane crashing when Aladdin is talking to Princess Jasmine -- bumbling through his words as he tries, and fails, to woo her.

"Why does the bee have flames coming out of his bottom?" my son asked.

I actually just started typing a recreation of my attempt at a response but then realized that I could be no more coherent on the virtual page here than I was in real life. How does one explain the concept of "crashing and burning" to a 5 year old?

All my efforts were pitiful crash and burns themselves.

"Why is he trying to fly a plane with her?" my son asked quizzically after my first shot at an explanation.

I tried to clear things up and then got, "Oh, so, the magic carpet is going to crash?"

Clearly I'm not getting through.

Plan B: the elimination of all metaphors from our lives. That should go well.