We have been very fortunate. Up until this point, neither of my younger children had ever wound up in the emergency room. That all changed on the night before Thanksgiving, when our adventurous two-year-old (his first word after Mama and Dada was “uh-oh”) obtained a gash that required emergency care.
It was our fault really. While our older children were sent off to bed, we kept our youngest up while we were finishing up putting the Christmas tree together. It was a way to spend some time with him alone, and finish up our task without the interruption of the going to bed ritual. He had a late nap, we rationalized.
Well, we do know that when I child is tired, he tends to be more accident prone. He fell against the end table causing a gash to open on his eyebrow, right above his left eye. The table is rounded with no sharp corners, but the impact caused an injury anyway. Fortunately, the eye wasn’t injured, and he didn’t suffer any head trauma, but the wound needed stitches (they used dermabond). As my husband got the bleeding stopped, I got the other two children up, down stairs and dressed in coats and shoes. My eldest slept in sweats that night, and my middle child just came along in her heavy pajamas.
We spent many hours in the emergency room of the local children’s hospital, the smell of turkey wafting over to us as the hospital staff celebrated the holiday while on shift. Everyone was pretty jovial, and we were sleep deprived. It was easy to be cranky about the situation since we were at the ER until about 4:30 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning, but there was a lot to be grateful for.
While we were in the ER waiting for our discharge paperwork, there was another child, seven, the same age as our oldest. The child coded. There was another child who has to be isolated because she had a serious illness. We were lucky. We bundled our little one up, now dubbed “Crash Romans” and the rest of our family and headed home to sleep for a few hours before the rush of the Thanksgiving holiday, leaving the less fortunate families behind.
Click here for more articles by Mary Ann Romans.
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