C-day and the not-so-single mom

C-day arrived Tuesday. Yes, that's "cast day."

My son was downright giddy as we crossed the parking lot and headed into the doctor's office. That happy feeling sadly didn't last long (see expression below).

The saw scared him; the people getting the cast off couldn't avoid touching his uber-sensitive hands; and then there were the pins.

The sorrowful look on his face in that picture is not from being skeeved out (as I very much was). It was his simply trying to relax and gather his bearings after the pain they inflicted on him just to get to this point.

Being careful not to hit the pins with the saw, they cut out the top portion of his cast and lifted it off, with the idea being the bottom part could then slide off.  The problem with that well-intentioned plan was that the bottom part was A) barely wide enough to fit around his arm under normal circumstances and B) not nearly roomy enough to slide around his pins, which were also completely tangled up in all the gauze and padding inside the cast.

When the woman who was taking off the cast at first ran into trouble, she called in a man, whom, in a misguided effort at lightheartedness, she called "Big John." He was big alright -- and strong. And he used every bit of that muscle power to tug and pull and stretch and try to pry that cast off my son. And since the cast that he was manipulating like it was a particularly tough side of beef was hung up on the pins that were embedded in my son's flesh and bone, it hurt a touch. And by a "touch," I mean that my son was literally crying and begging him to stop. It was utterly heartbreaking.

(What's a little funny is that before this medieval torture experiment, my son, who had heard the woman refer to the man as "Big John," told me he wanted to change his name to "Big John." John, he said, was a good name, but the "Big" part made it extra awesome, and henceforth he would be known as "Big John." I didn't ask, but I'm guessing he might have changed his mind about that once the cast was off.)

The cast did finally come off, though, and the doctor reported excellent results from his x-ray, so out came the pins. While that part would seem, on the surface, to be the more painful bit of the day, particularly since it involved nothing more than a big pair of pliers and some gauze, it turned out to be a piddly nuisance compared to getting the cast off.... for my son, anyway.

I, on the other hand, did not fare as well.  I'm not the type who can't handle the sight of blood, but there was something about seeing these pins embedded in my son's arm that really made me queasy. And it just got worse and worse the more I thought about it. And then very nearly reached a catastrophic crescendo when they started pulling those things out. I can't say for sure how I looked at the time, but I will say that the nurse very quickly brought me a chair at one point. I can only imagine that I was turning either a pale shade of white or a putrid shade of green.

My son made it through with flying colors, though, and is now cast-free, though he still has to wear a sling and still can't pursue any of the standard little-boy activities until his arm heals a little more. They warned me at the beginning this was going to be a long recovery, so while I hope the cast was the worst part (since the break and surgery at least), it's certainly not the last.

The countdown and the not-so-single mom

There is a countdown going on in my house. It's not the countdown to my son's birthday, which is only a week away. It's not the countdown to my wedding, which is only three months away (still so much to do -- eek!) It's not the countdown to a vacation or a fun outing. No, all of that pales in comparison to what's happening on Tuesday -- the cast comes off (insert a deep, echoing "dun-dun-dun!" here).

We head back to the orthopedist on Tuesday to get his cast off and, assuming the x-rays look good, pins out. The doctor has indicated that my son will have a sling or something on his arm afterward for a while to let it continue healing, but he doesn't expect to put a cast back on.

My son is, in a word, eager.

Since at least the 7th of this month, he's been telling me every morning how many days remain until  he gets his cast off.

"Morning, sweetie."

"Morning, Mommy. 10 more days," he mutters as he stretches and yawns his way toward wakefulness.

I'll also get regular reports throughout the day, just in case I'd forgotten since the morning or, you know, failed to grasp how counting works.

"It's 8 days until I get my cast off.  And tomorrow it'll be 7. And the next day it'll be 6. And the next day it'll be 5..."

I won't write this sequence all the way to the end in order to spare your eyes and sanity, gentle reader, but I assure you I'm subjected to it day in and day out, often several times a day. I'm not sure he has ever learned a math skill better, faster or more thoroughly than he has counting backwards for the sake of this countdown.

Despite my grumblings here, I have expressed nothing but excitement for my son every time he launches into this daily recitation. He's been so utterly miserable hauling that thing around for the past three weeks. Sleeping has remained difficult and uncomfortable, and that legendary itching that comes along with casts has set in. Though he still has a lot of recovery to go (not the least of which is persistent nerve damage that is causing him a lot of pain and still making his left hand practically useless), both of us are quite ready for this part to be done.

Only 4 days left. And tomorrow it'll be 3. And the next day it'll be 2. ...

Counting conundrum and the not-so-single mom

It became clear to me yesterday that either I or my son's teacher has failed him in one distinct but important way.

We were driving from home to my future stepson's baseball practice last night when my son announced that he was going to count to "ten hundred."

"Ten hundred," I told him, wasn't a number. What he was thinking of was one thousand.

He brushed off that information as trivial to the task he was about to undertake and began counting aloud.

"1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 ... 45 - 46 - 47 - 48 ... 71 - 72 - 73 ... 98 - 99 - 100."

He was flawless right up until that point, but then here's where things went horribly wrong.

"100 - 200 - 300 - 400 - 500"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a sec. Do you realize that you're actually counting by hundreds there? Did you know it's actually 101 - 102 - 103 and so on before you get to 200?"

*Stunned silence from the back seat.*

He took a few moments to process that revolutionary information and then began to count again, starting for some reason at 220 and proceeding through about 370 before we made it to the park. And he did pretty well with this newfound world of counting beyond 100. There were occasional times when he'd have trouble when a ten turned over, i.e. saying something like 229, 203. I assume he was trying to mentally picture these numbers that seemed ridiculously cumbersome and easily mistook "30" for "03."

Still, that overcomeable error is small potatoes to skipping entire swaths of numbers by virtue of simply not understanding they exist. I must pay better attention from now on.

The latest thing and the not-so-single mom

The other day my son suddenly insisted that he needed to have a keychain. Specifically, he needed to hang a keychain on the bookbag he carries to school.

"Well," I suggested, "keychains can be a cool thing to collect when you travel. Maybe we should start getting a keychain at the places we visit."

No, he insisted, that wasn't soon enough. He needed a keychain and he needed it now.

Still unsure of why in the world this was a pressing need but willing to go along for the ride, I told him, "OK, I think we have some extras at home. I'm sure we can find you one."

Nuh-uh, nothing doing. We needed to get the $2 a family member had recently given him and head to his school's bookstore -- and pronto.

Actually, let me be clear (and fair). He asked about this for like three days in a row and was very patient with his pokey, difficult-to-wake mom when, for three days in a row, we didn't make it to school in time to catch the bookstore, which closes about 5 minutes before the "late bell," open.

But finally we made it one day last week, and he proudly presented his $2 (and 12 cents of mine for tax) for a squishy, rubber pig keychain. And then before we could even head into his class, we had to get that keychain out of its plastic baggie and onto the handle of his bookbag.

I was veritably rolling my eyes at the import my son was assigning to this bizarre little thing. But then I walked into his classroom, and the veil was lifted.

As soon as we cleared the doorway, one of his classmates came running up and said, "Hey, you got a keychain! Chip," he called to another boy across the room, "he got his first keychain!" This was clearly a moment of importance and delight, one that merited the excited attention of nearly everyone within those four walls who carried a "Y" chromosome.

My son's friend then proceeded to grab his bag to show my son that, among the huge wad of 30 or so keychains dangling from his bookbag strap, he also had the same pig one. I then started noticing that the bags of several students, seemingly just the boys, had collections of keychains, of various quantity, hanging from them. Apparently keychains are the new Silly Bandz (or at least the ones not disallowed by school rules).

Though I've always tried to be one who turned a cynical eye on fads, I couldn't help but feeling a twinge of guilt when I learned why my son had been asking for keychains. Of course he wanted to be cool with his buddies at school. Of course he wanted to have what the other kids have. I'm quite frankly impressed that his requests had been pretty low-key and mild, given the obvious importance his friends placed on the keychain as soon as we walked in.

With a little more distance from the moment, though, my thoughts on this little encounter have changed a bit. First, I'm glad that, despite what is surely some miniature version of peer pressure, my son seems completely content to have only the one keychain, rather than 20-pound collection of his classmate. That perhaps bodes well for the future when the pressure to have far more expensive accoutrements will surely creep into his life.

Second, I'm giving some thought to the importance of those accoutrements. Being acceptable to your peers is, I know, a huge part of school years. I remember not being able to afford the cool jeans my classmates were wearing in middle and high school and how ostracized I felt by that. On the other hand, not having everything, like expensive jeans, handed to me on a silver platter surely taught me some important life lessons.

I get that these are topics far too weighty to have much bearing on kindergarten, but they're out there and they're coming -- and sooner than I'll want, I know. Meanwhile, if you see any cool keychains, I've got a kid who'd probably love to hang them on his bookbag.

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.