Emergency Room

Most of you have heard about our fun adventure a week and a half ago, but I still need to get it recorded. Lark had come home from work pretty late, so the girls were fairly wound up. They were supposed to be getting ready for bed, but when they get like that I find it better to just go in my room and shut the door -- and let Lark deal with their noise! I guess Lark had done the same thing, though, because she was locked up in her room when Chloe decided to go get her pajamas on. The girls had moved my ottoman over by the stairs so they could do burpees after getting pj's on, and Chloe was trying to jump over the ottoman to get into her room. She didn't make it and fell on her wrist (bending it backward), and somehow smacked her feet on the stairs. They got a little bruised up. I wasn't sure if she had broken anything, but when her arm started swelling up really fast, and then she started running a fever we thought we better take her in. It was almost 8:30, so we took her to urgent care. They x-rayed her and confirmed it was broke, and then sent us over to the ER to get it set.

That was mostly just sitting around, waiting for all the experts to come in and give their opinions. One physician thought they might be able to do a hematoma block, which is a local anesthesia and would avoid having to put her to sleep, but when the orthopedic surgeon came he realized she had bent the wrist the less common direction so it probably wouldn't work on her. Finally at midnight she got an IV, they knocked her out, and took about 2 seconds to reset it. Then she got all bandaged up. We made it home a little after 2 AM.

The doctors were all very funny. They may not teach them much about nutrition in med school, but they apparently have some comedy classes. They teased Chloe about all the secrets they were going to get out of her while she was under the medication, but unbeknownst to them she was just typical Chloe (when she's not being shy). All the crazy things she said were 100% her.

Before she medicated, she was just hooked up to a machine monitoring her vitals. I made a comment to Brandon about maybe having to take the next day off work, if he wasn't able to get any sleep that night. Then I just made the observation that it would be his first day he'd taken off. Chloe looked confused, so he explained "the first day -- at his new job." The thought of Brandon having a new job was enough to send her into cardiac arrest (well, not quite), but her heart rate spiked from 80 to 120 in just a couple seconds. We had to calm her down and let her know he doesn't have a new job, it's the same one he's had for a couple months.

The doctor who had teased her about asking questions about boys while she was medicated, came back in to check on her after she was waking up. He said to her, "So, Chloe, who's this John guy you were talking about? Is he a boy at your school?" He obviously didn't know she is homeschooled. Chloe didn't skip a beat though, she just replied, "John Green?" If you aren't familiar with him, he's the guy who makes the Crash Course videos on YouTube that we use occasionally for history.

She was sent home with a temporary cast on, and told to be very careful and come back in a week. If the bone had moved at all they were going to have to do surgery and put pins in it. Scary! But when we went back on Thursday, they x-rayed it again and found that it had not moved. The doctor confessed that he was really surprised about that. He hadn't expected it to stay put. But then he said he didn't want to mess with it if it was doing OK on its own, so we have to go back again this week to see about getting it casted.