Tough Break

No, I'm not talking about the Cardinals and the depression that has hit all their fans this Monday morning. I'm talking of the events from this past Saturday which had my wife and I running around in a semi-controlled state of panic for the majority of the day and evening. Any parent here knows there is nothing worse than seeing your child in pain, nothing. Unfortunately, my youngest managed to turn a classmate's birthday party into an afternoon at two hospitals, a dose of conscious sedation, and a cast for the next 6 or so weeks.

All starts at a birthday party for one of his classmates.  It's at a local gymnastics place near us, with a bunch of kids running around on tumbling mats, inclined foam ramps, you know the drill.  I wasn't there - I pulled duty of watching the other two while my wife had party duty - but I guess the place is not managed well at all.  The owner runs from one room to the next, one party to the next, and just had a pair of teenagers watching over this party in particular.  Anyways, my son is on one of the inclined ramps, gets shoved off the edge, and falls 18" or so.  Of course, natural tendancy is to brace for the fall, which leads to one of these...

 

Yup, that was his arm upon arrival at our local hospital. Bent in ways the arm isn't supposed to bend. Now, I grew up with an emergency room nurse as a mother, and as a Biology major, so I'm pretty tempered to medical mishaps. I don't get skeeved out by the sight of blood, and actually find Trauma In The E.R. on Discovery or whatever channel it runs really interesting to watch. However, all that goes out the window in a blink of an eye when it's your own child. You know that stomach-dropping sensation you get when you're on a rollercoaster? That's what I felt when they first took the ice and towel off his arm in the triage area. Anyways, they get him stabilized and the pain under control with some morphine, and then take that picture above. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, the local hospital didn't have a pediatric orthopedic surgeon on staff so decided to transfer him down to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) - one of the best in the country - by ambulance. I chased behind on the way down, and got settled in for a fun 8 hours there.

We get into downtown Philadelphia, and are immediately checked into a room in the emergency wing. Again, he's made comfortable and he was in decent spirits flipping between iCarly and Spongebob. There was only one pediatric orthopedic on the floor at the time, and there was another severe case already under way, so we were told we might have to wait a bit. No worries really. However, stars aligned and the surgeon had a 30-minute window where he was able to take care of us - right in the room. They wheeled in a portable x-ray machine in, got us all in lead aprons, and went to work.

I mentioned conscious sedation above - let me elaborate. For those who aren't aware, it's a form of anesthesia that is routinely used when the patient needs to be both physically as well as mentally checked out. The used ketamine, a great analgesic (takes away the pain) and dissociative (takes away the memories). Now I've been under conscious sedation myself multiple times during bouts of kidney stones, and it's a very pleasant experience. You go under in seconds, and awake quickly and rather refreshed. HOWEVER, what I wasn't aware of or prepared for was how a patient looks when they are under. I was expecting closed eyes, relaxed face, basically asleep at the wheel. What I was NOT prepared for was my son lying there, eyes open, with a glazed, watery blank stare on his face - I'm getting emotional just thinking about it again now. :(

The only thing worse than the look was the way his arm was manipulated. Again, pit-in-the-stomach feeling. What the experience did do for me is give me a renewed understanding and appreciation for what doctors, nurses, and the like do on our behalf for us and our love ones. The training needed to disassociate yourself from that in order to get the best result for the patients is remarkable, even more so when we're talking about kids. Once it was all over, the guy did a really good job and pulled a near-perfect realignment of the bones. We're in for bi-weekly follow-ups for the next two months, give or take, but hopefully once its all said and done he'll be good as new and ready for the baseball season in the spring.