I was in the sewing
department at Michael’s today when my cell phone rang. It was Buddy.
He had been in the park playing with the kids and Grant was hurt.
“He was playing soccer
barefoot and he has a big cut on his foot.
I think it needs stitches.”
His foot, that’s good. It’s far removed from his head. Just to
be sure I checked. “Is his head
okay?”
“Yeah, it’s just his
foot,” he said.
“Okay, I’ll meet you at
the ER.”
When I got to the ER
Grant was in a wheel chair and his foot was bloody. I gave him a kiss and then leaned in for a
closer look at the gash on his foot. The
cut was long and deep but the blood was oozing, not dripping. I thought it was a borderline case for
stitches but of course I don’t have those expensive “M.D.” letters after my
name either.
The next thing I knew
Audrey jumped into my field of vision.
“My finger, Mommy, my finger!!”
“Your finger?” I asked,
confused. I mean, aren’t we here for
Grant’s foot?
“Oh yeah, she hurt her
finger playing volleyball in the park,” Buddy said. “I thought we could ask the doctor to look at
it too while we’re here.”
“Mommy my finger hurts
SO MUCH! You should have seen how it
happened!” Audrey said. And then right there in the crowded ER she
gave me a slow motion reenactment of the injury, in which it appears she leaned
waaaayyyyy back and then spiked a volleyball with a single index finger.
I examined her finger,
compared it to the one on her other hand and concluded that it was a little
swollen but for all I knew that was because she had eaten too many potato chips
for breakfast that morning. She could
bend it enough to show that it wasn’t broken.
I didn’t think it was even worthwhile to ask the doctor to look at
it.
* * *{wavy lines, wavy lines, go back in time to Oct 2011} * * *
“When did you say he broke his arm?” the doctor
asked, holding up an X-ray in the ER room.
“About an hour ago,” I said.
“No, this break is older than that,” he
said. “This has already started to
heal. Like it’s a few days or even weeks
old.”
Days.
Weeks. My mind clicked back in
time. It stopped on October 5th,
the day that Grant was playing goalie and his coach sent a practice shot his
direction. Grant had blocked it with his
hand and then complained later that it hurt.
We had put an ace bandage on it for a few days but when Grant said that
he was ready to go back to soccer I assumed his arm was fine again and I let
him go back to his regular activities.
With a hairline fracture in his right radial bone.
The doctor’s tone was condescending and
judgmental when he said, “You see, this is what happens when you don’t treat
those initial hairline fractures.”
I wanted to yell at him. “I know it’s clear to you that he had a
hairline fracture that later broke into a compound one, however you have a
couple of key pieces of data that I didn’t have. One is hindsight, which as you know is
20/20. The other is that X-RAY that
you’re holding in your hand. I didn’t
have one of those! I was going on
maternal instincts and intuition. And
with mine I can see into my children’s souls but I can’t see their bones!”
* * *{wavy lines, wavy lines, back to the present} * * *
“Mommy, Libby hurt her
finger playing volleyball and she had to wear athletic tape on her finger for
two weeks. TWO WEEKS MOMMY! I can’t live like that for TWO WEEKS!!!”
I hugged her and gave
her a soothing and kid-friendly version of “This too shall pass.” The hug also allowed me the opportunity to
look over Audrey’s shoulder and see how Grant was doing.
Just at that moment he
was wiping blood off his foot and smearing it on his pants. “Does that vending machine have sandwiches in
it?” he asked a passing nurse.
Because I love you, dear
readers, I’ll spare you the details of the next few hours in the ER. I’ll cut right to the end of the story, which
is that Grant has seven stitches in his foot, bringing his total count to
I-lost-count-25-stitches-ago, Audrey maintains full use of all 10 fingers, and
my sanity, defying all odds, continues to remain intact.
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