{No pictures were taken at this stage of our adventure. Which is really a shame.}
But let's backtrack just a tiny bit. Last Wednesday we had another adventure that almost ended in the ER. We were (again) making dinner. My sweet sister Jenna was staying with us until Melissa's wedding, and she had just gone upstairs to put Camille to bed. Lydia got a little impatient and tried to climb into her highchair and somehow pulled it over on herself. David and I were both there within seconds pulling the chair off of her and picking her up. We didn't notice the blood on her forehead until Lydia reached for me and we transferred her from David's arms to mine. Then he saw the blood and grabbed something to try to staunch the flow of blood - because man, oh, man that thing was bleeding. We both know that head wounds bleed so we tried not to panic. Lydia was not happy with the paper towel being held to her forehead so we ended up just getting a bandaid and sticking it on top, hoping that it would stop the blood enough to actually inspect the wound. It stopped bleeding and we started cleaning her up a little bit, then realized that we really should take a picture. So here she is - taking one of the bloody paper towels to the garbage can and then showing us her banana.
It ended up healing nicely and we patted ourselves on the back for making the right decision under so much pressure. (I should note - some people might think that we should have taken her in for stitches for this cut, and that's just fine. We used our best judgement and tried to pick the very best thing for Lydia. We really do feel like it was the right choice not to take her to the ER for this cut.)
Fast forward to Friday night, ten days later. We have another head wound that we are dealing with. As I said before, as soon as we realized that it was bleeding and we got in close to look at it - we knew that we needed to get it checked out. It didn't bleed very badly, and she calmed down pretty quickly - but it was so close to the eye that we didn't want it to scar or to cause further damage to her eye (or bleed into her eye during the night, because how do you put a bandaid on that?).
We headed into the office, and had to wait a while because we've switched insurance since our last well check and last minute we realized that we hadn't checked to make sure that our pediatrician was still covered. (And we've had some issues with our insurance since the switch, so we especially didn't want to end up footing the whole bill instead of the co-pay.) But after a few minutes of double-checking we were good to go and they got us back. Lydia doesn't particularly like the doctors (read: she hates it), and started some intense crying as we walked back to our room. Luckily we had a good nurse who was really kind, even when she was using some gauze to clean out the wound so she could see it better. She sent the doctor in to look things over, and the doctor told us that she definitely would recommend getting stitches - but that the cut was too close to the eye for them to feel comfortable doing there and that she recommended heading to the ER. We knew that this was a possibility, because the office policy is that they don't stitch anything inside of the eye socket - but we thought that it was worth making the stop at the pediatrician instead of heading straight to the ER. I'm really glad that we went, because part of me was still kind of hoping that they would just give us a special bandaid and tell us that it would heal on it's own. It was good to hear from an experienced doctor that stitches were definitely the way to go. (I kind of feel like the ER would stitch you no matter whether you really needed it or not just because you felt it was bad enough to come to the hospital but the pediatrician would be more willing to tell you if it didn't need stitches.) They didn't charge us a co-pay, but said that they would consider it a "pre-triage" and send us to the hospital. (I later had to look up what triage meant. Google says: Triage is the process of determining the priority of patients' treatments based on the severity of their condition. Which makes total sense.)
So we headed to the hospital, which is where the above picture was taken, stopping only for a quick prayer in the parking lot that everything would go well. The people there were really fabulous, even though they seemed busy they were all very friendly and very willing to help make us feel comfortable and taken care of. (Shout out to the American Fork Hospital. We've always had a great experience with them.) Honestly, the most traumatic part of the entire experience was during the triage process at the hospital when the nurse weighed her and then attached a blood oxygen level monitor to Lydia's big toe. Lydia screamed like someone was cutting off her leg. Or like we had let a snake bite her and it was hanging on with it's fangs. Seriously. It was intense. But we survived and they moved us back to a bed in the actual ER. At this point I was the most nervous that I'd been all night because I knew that the stitches were coming and that it wasn't going to be happy (and the fact that it the ER looked just like something out of a trauma scene in a movie). But the people that we worked with were fabulous and totally set us at ease. They gave us the option to sedate Lydia, use a LET numbing solution that would take almost an hour to fully kick in, or use a local anesthetic administered by a needle. We decided that just getting everything over with faster with the local anesthetic would be the best bet - and again, I feel like we made a great decision. It was definitely the best option for us.
They got out a little backboard with wraps/straps, similar to what they would use for a broken back for transport, and explained to us the whole process. Then we laid Lydia down on the board and they strapped her in. I think that being strapped to the board was worse than the actual stitches, but David and I stood by her the whole time and talked to her about whatever came into our heads. We talked about the farm animals, and facetime-ing with grandpa, and about how much we loved her. At one point David said something about this experience definitely making the blog, to which we both laughed at because pretty much everything that Lydia does makes the blog - and this was definitely a much bigger event and definitely deserved a blog post. But, I guess her first head injury was just going to be added into her 23 month post - so maybe that was what she was looking for after all. The doctor worked fast and was done in just a few short minutes. Three little stitches next to her eye and she was all done. (We'll go back on Wednesday to have the stitches removed.) They gave us instructions, ointment for the stitches, and then we checked out. I've had some issues with our insurance, but our ER co-pay was only $50, and I feel really great about that.
I know that this sounds really silly, but overall, our first ER experience was really successful. Lydia was really content to let us hold her the whole time and really wasn't upset (other than the monitor on her toe and the actual strapped to a board/stitches part) at all. I feel like we made all the right decisions, and that now we have even more parental experience to draw from for the future. We picked up some dinner on the way home, as our pizzas were long forgotten. I got some Panda Express that I shared with Lydia in the backseat on the way home, and David got some Arby's. (I have to add: We obviously didn't grab any coupons on the way out the door, because food was the last thing on our mind - but David totally gave them his sob story that he didn't have coupons because we had just gotten out of the ER with his little girl and could they please give him the coupon deal anyway. They totally did. It was really awesome.) We changed Lydia into her pajamas and she fell asleep in her bed almost immediately, sweet girl. She slept soundly all night, and didn't wake up until eight when I went in to check on her because she never sleeps past eight and I was worried.
All day today she has been talking about "the doctor". She told both sets of grandparents about the whole thing, and talked to me about it at least once every hour or so. The conversations all went something like this-
L: Doctor?
Me: Did we go to the doctor yesterday?
L: Yeah.
Me: Were the doctors nice?
L: Doctor, nice. My toe!
Me: Did they put a monitor on your toe?
L: Yeah, my toe.
Me: Did they help fix your eye? Did they make your eye feel better?
L: My eye! Doctor, nice. My toe.
Haha. Even just thinking about it makes me laugh. The toe thing was seriously traumatic.
I'm also happy to report that she seemed happy and just like herself today. Her eye barely bothered her at all. The swelling and bruising actually went down, which we were concerned would get worse overnight. It looks a little sad, but other than that - she's handling it really well. At least until bedtime when she got really upset and kept escalating her emotions until she was completely inconsolable. I think her eye hurt, and she didn't want to lay down, and she just wanted to go downstairs. But David and I took turns holding, bouncing, and rocking to her while David sang her primary songs and she finally calmed down enough to put her in her bed. She cried as we were leaving the room but fell asleep within 15 minutes and is now sleeping soundly. Poor sweet girl. We love her so much, and we are just grateful to Heavenly Father that the cut wasn't worse, and that the experience was so positive. We are so lucky to have Lydia and we love her adventurous spirit, although, hopefully now she got the whole going to the emergency room thing out of her system and we can avoid any more ER adventures.
