To The Hospital....AWAY!

So today, Karrie and I were supposed to work on the book. We get together every Monday to write and we pay for a sitter to watch the kids. This morning Karrie called to inform me that one of her girls had a really bad stomach ache and she needed to take her to urgent care to find out what was going on. Instead of canceling our workday, we decided we would still try and get together at her house as planned.

I arrived at Karrie’s house and met the sitter at noon but Karrie wasn’t there yet. A short time later Karrie called my cell and said she had been sitting at the doctors’ office for about an hour and a half at this point and still hadn’t seen the doctor. (Don’t you just HATE that?) She had no idea how much longer it would take. In the mean time, my kids were getting antsy, as we were locked out of Karrie’s house, so they started playing in her front yard and running in the snow.

While I’m on the phone with Karrie deciding what to do Titus, my 3 year old, slips on a rock and falls. But because his hands were cold from throwing snowballs he had them stuck in his pockets, therefore he couldn’t get them out fast enough to brace his fall. So he hit a rock…face first! I screamed (of course) and both the sitter and myself went running as fast as we could toward Titus. As I picked him up and there was blood gushing out all over his cheek, under his eye and it had instantly swollen up and filled with blood, or fluid (or God only knows what that was.)

So I called my husband and frantically told him what had happened and said that he needed to meet me at the urgent care center by our house. (And I admit that YES! I broke every speed limit the ENTIRE way there!) Once we arrived we were informed that they don’t open until 5 p.m.! (What the? Urgent Care? Not open ‘til 5? FREAK!!!) We then raced up to the hospital, which added another ten minutes to our trip! And I’ll have you know I DID NOT speed that time, as I was following my husband who was just “Oh…so mellow…and calm…and slow!” which really made me mad! (OK, so I was a little on edge, or as some would say, “over the edge”, but he was just too stinkin’ calm! COME ON! “Drive like the wind dang it!”) You see I don’t have the best track record considering the first time BOTH my children ever threw up it resulted in hospitalization. When my kids get hurt, they do it BIG! So I’ll admit I can tend to be a little, shall we say, “overly cautious?”

Once we got to the hospital they proceeded to check Titus over and clean out the wound (which was just glorious I might add! –NOT!) Then they put some numbing solution on and you would swear they had put flesh-eating acid on his face by the amount of screams coming out of him! Thankfully, he didn’t need stitches and they were “fairly certain” he hadn’t broken the bone under his eye. They offered to x-ray him but at that point that was the very last possible thing IN THE WORLD I wanted to experience! About two and a half hours into this ordeal the most amazing lady came in and offered him a lollipop and you would have thought the heavens themselves had opened up! From that point on, the doctor was poking away at his wound, looking at it with weird glasses, shinning bright lights in his eyes and he was as happy as ever just suckin’ on his lolly! All was OK until…we had to put on “the dreaded band-aid!” Yep, that’s right! He completely lost it over a BAND-AID! I put band-aids on this kid daily and all of a sudden he decides to go into full atomic meltdown mode over getting one!?!? So the finale of the day was Titus screaming bloody murder and flailing around in a doctors’ chair, while I ever so gently placed a band-aid over his boo boo!