I don’t have any friends who work for Child Protective Services, but if I had one, I would ask my friend this urgent question: “Exactly how many ER visits until my child’s file gets tagged?”
I have a six-year-old son who is one of “those” boys. If you live with one of “those” boys, you don’t even need to read any further; you know exactly what I’m about to say. You may even be wondering, as I am, Just how many eggs have to get scrambled before my omelet gets eaten?
Grayson’s first trip to the ER, before his first birthday (which should have tipped us off) was to remove a fish hook from his finger. Now, you might think that the hook got there the way one usually does: a fishing trip misadventure. Nope. It got there via wall art. Until the day it damaged our child, my husband and I had a piece of driftwood, decorated with various and sundry painted fishing lures, hanging from a wall in our TV room. During a piggy back ride one afternoon, curiosity got the better of poor Gray, who reached out at will and regretted it immediately.
Because he couldn’t wait to walk so he could keep up with his older brother, Gray began walking at nine months. I don’t think he should have. For many months beyond his ninth, his head was still far too big for the rest of his body, which didn’t bode well for his stability. I believe our next ER visit was due to this balance issue. During a stay at a condo in Leadville, Colorado, Gray was attempting to run up the stairs which began with a step, then a tiled landing, and a 90-degree turn to the next step. You’d think the turn would be the tricky part, but you’d be wrong. It was the very first step that tripped him up (literally) and landed him right on his chin on the tiled landing. Meanwhile, his tongue was between his teeth, which is what caused all of the blood. The ER visit was short and sweet. They promptly sent us upstairs to the local dentist to see what was going on with the bloody tissue in a gap between two teeth. We all assumed he’d knocked out a tooth and left some flapping skin behind. Oh no. That tissue was a part of his tongue he’d bitten off.
The next visit, fortunately, was also an out-of-town one, this time in Estes Park. We had been staying in a beautiful little cabin on the Fall River. The yard outside of our cabin had a hammock, which, for most people, I assume, causes nothing more than rest. For Grayson, however, it caused what is commonly called nursemaid’s elbow when he spun from the hammock and landed on the ground with his arm caught above his head in said hammock. We, the parents, didn’t actually observe this feat, but received the report from the big brother when, some 30 minutes later, Grayson cried because he couldn’t bend his arm enough to put a cookie into his mouth.
The Estes Park ER stay was not only our longest, but also our most humiliating. His injury was instantly recognized as a dislocated elbow (called nursemaid’s elbow because when nursemaids were common, the injury often occurred when the caretaker yanked her charge up by the arm, causing the radius to slip out of the ligament that holds it in place at the elbow); however, they did not reset the elbow for nearly two hours. Instead, we were questioned multiple times by various individuals about exactly how the elbow had been damaged. Despite the fact that there were exactly no other patients, we were made to wait all that time for no purpose that I could discern. I couldn’t even spy a surveillance camera in our room. And believe me, I looked. This is when my fear of the ER-CPS connection officially began.
Which is why we skipped the ER the time Gray slid down the sloped, rocky retaining wall in front of our house, leaving a scrape down his spine and buttocks that definitely would have incriminated me. Nor did we venture to the ER when a balloon burst and sliced his cornea; thankfully, his doctor told us she could take care of it right in her office. But we did have to go when he hurt the same arm as the nursemaid’s elbow playing with his brother on the trampoline, a device which some people, I now know, refer to as “an ER visit waiting to happen.” This one was fairly cut-and-dried: two boys on the trampoline, one goes down, hairline fracture in the radius, resulting in a cast for three weeks.
Our most recent journey to our local ER was due to a mongrel tree that jumped up and bit Grayson an inch above his left eye as he attempted to politely sled past it (yes, without a helmet on … this one time). There is absolutely nothing in What to Expect When You’re Expecting that prepares you for the day your child runs screaming into the house with his face covered in blood. Control freak that I am, I didn’t even hesitate to consider whether I was ruining my “good” towels on that day (which I did). Instead, I cleaned up the gash the best I could, paper-taped some gauze over it to keep the blood in one area, and sped to our friendly neighborhood ER where they asked me if he had been wearing a helmet. Sigh.
Here is what you should know if you are an ER doc working with a kid: never give him the option of not getting the necessary stitches. Instantly, Gray said he would much rather have a huge scar for the rest of his life, thank you very much, and can we please leave now? It was traumatic, but we all (yes, it was a team effort) managed to get the stitches in, after which Grayson vowed never to sled again in his entire life (he asked to go when we got home).
I must admit, though, what worries me more than the ER-CPS connection (I am sure this article would be evidence enough that I am not culpable) is how to connect the part of Grayson’s brain that thinks, Huh, that looks fun, with the part that says, Hold on there, partner. Something’s telling me we should swim through the trench, not over it. Not five minutes after we got home from the stitches, Gray stood with a paddle ball under his chin, the elastic string pulled as far as his arm could reach, and he asked, “Hey, Mom? Do you think I’d feel the vibration if the ball hit the paddle?”
On second thought, maybe I should just be proactive about this. If I were to call CPS tomorrow and set up a preemptive meeting, would they go easier on me?