Emergency Doctor Visit

There is nothing quite like the feeling that you get in the pit of your stomach when you have allowed one of your children to be injured.  And when you yourself are directly responsible for the injury, that sick feeling quickly spreads from your stomach, all the way to the depths of your very soul.  This was the feeling I had yesterday as I drove across town with my two year old son in tow, trying to make it to the pediatrician’s office in under one second.

It all started out so innocently.  Edward and I were doing laundry, and he was helping.  He likes to help with the laundry, so I try to take advantage of this as much as possible, since he will soon figure out that doing the laundry sucks and will no longer be quite so helpful.  One thing he really likes doing is transferring clothes, from the basket to the washer, from the washer to the dryer, and from the dryer back to the basket.  We were getting ready to take some laundry out of the dryer when it happened.  He grabbed the hinge side of the door just as I was opening it and his finger got caught.  He screamed, I slammed the door shut and grabbed him, knowing how much it hurts to get your finger pinched in something, and that was when I saw all the blood.

This was not a normal pinch in the door.  His finger had a huge cut that looked like it went about halfway through his finger, and his nail on the other side was purple and bleeding out every side.  That was my cue to freak out.  I picked him up and ran as fast as I could to our bathroom, where I washed his finger off, poured some peroxide into it, dried it off, and wrapped it up in two Mickey Mouse Band-Aids.  He had stopped screaming by this time, but he wouldn’t stop saying “Door got me.  Scratch my finger.” and whimpering pathetically.  All of which felt like spikes being driven into my heart.  So, even though the bleeding had been contained, he could move his finger, and he seemed to be calming down, I decided to call the doctor anyway, just to see what they thought.

They said to get him in there right away.  They asked how fast I could get there.  They told me they had no free appointments that day but they would just see him whenever we got there.  This wonderful personal care being provided to me should have made me feel better, but instead what it said to me was “You have probably permanently damaged your son forever, and if you don’t get him treatment in the next five minutes he will probably lose his finger, if not his whole arm.”  So I grabbed him again and raced downstairs and out the door to the car, noticing on the way out that his pants were soaked.  Luckily there was all this clean laundry laying about, so I snatched up a clean pair of pants as I flew by and took them with me.

When we got to the doctor’s office, Edward told me that his finger was all better, and he wanted to go visit his sister at school.  I asked if he would like the doctor to look at his finger, and he said yes, but added that he wanted his sister to be the doctor.  I suppose she does give him more check-ups than anyone else, but sadly she was detained at kindergarten for another few hours, so the pediatrician was going to have to do.  In the waiting room, I decided to change him into his new pants, so we slipped into the restroom where I realized that I had not brought the diaper bag, or any clean diapers at all.  I put the new, dry pants on him diaperless and then just prayed that he would hold everything in until we got home and not spray anything on the nice doctor.

The doctor saw us pretty quickly, took one look at the finger, and declared that it was fine.  The bone wasn’t broken, nothing was infected or dirty, and he didn’t need stitches or anything.  In fact, he told me that all the bleeding was actually a good sign, because oftentimes blood gets trapped under the fingernail, building up pressure and becoming very painful.  Luckily that didn’t happen here, so Edward might even keep his fingernail.  Maybe.  Anyway, the point was, I had rushed over there for pretty much no reason, except for the “better safe than sorry” defense, which I was okay with using.

At this point, it was time for treats.  Edward grabbed a Lightning McQueen sticker on the way out and stuck it onto his chest, proudly pointing (with his hurt finger no less) and shouting “Light Queen!  Light Queen!” in a very excited manner.  We then drove immediately to the grocery store where I let him pick out whatever kind of candy he wanted as a treat, for being such a good little patient, and because I still felt super guilty about squashing his little finger.  He picked out M&M’s, which was a good choice, because it meant I got to eat half of them.  We did have a little scare soon after that, where I thought he was bleeding all over the place again, but it turned out that he was sucking the candies up with his mouth and then spitting them back into his hand, and the red dye from the candy was running down his fingers.  Ha ha!  Good one, Edward!

Luckily, we made it home with no accidents in his diaperless pants, and his finger didn’t seem to bother him that much for the rest of the day.  He did give the dryer a dirty look though, when we went back to finally get that laundry out of it.  “Bad door!  Scratch finger!” he told it reproachfully.  But even if he blames the door for everything, it still doesn’t wash that sick, guilty feeling out of my soul.