April's Misadventure

Well. That was an eventful weekend. You may remember from my last post that April was jealous of Kimmy's overnight zoo outing. I think that now April has learned that sometimes boring is good!

Last Friday evening April took a little tumble off her bike.  She wobbled a little and then just tipped over. It was a nothing kind of fall. Except that when I came up to make sure she was ok, I could see that she definitely wasn't. She was holding her right arm which had a wonky bulge at the elbow.  I thought at the time that it was dislocated. I immediately went into crisis mode, trying to remain calm and reassuring to April when really I just wanted to FREAK OUT.  I ditched the bikes on the lawn and ran in the house with the kids.

And thus began some of the longest hours of my life. So much waiting in so many different rooms. We went to the Children's Hospital Urgent Care because it was close and because at the time I thought her elbow was 'only' dislocated. They did x-rays and then I helped April to the bathroom. She didn't want to go at first because she had to use her good arm to support her hurt one, but I assured her that if she held her arm, I would do everything else. "But I will do the peeing," she clarified. She's so precise, she cracks me up.

Later the doctor called me into the hallway to deliver the news that her humerus, the bone in her upper arm, was broken right at the elbow. Her lateral condyle, the one of the knobby bits that forms the elbow joint, had broken off and was out of place and rotated. She was most likely going to need surgery and needed to go downtown to the hospital. They put her arm in a splint and got her ready for transfer.

Poor April was in a lot of pain and even threw up a couple times. She still had her wits about her, though. At the hospital she told the first doctor about falling off her bike, but then refused to answer anyone else who walked in and asked "What happened to your arm?" She was very annoyed that she kept having to talk about it.  She was scared and crying a little. She told me that, "Sometimes when I get scared my nose gets a widdle bit nervous and it over-refloats out of one hole."

This picture breaks my heart. My poor little girl!

April was admitted to the hospital around 2 AM and got some pain medication before finally falling asleep around 3. At 7 AM the doctors started coming in again "Hi April! How did you hurt your arm?" and we waited and waited some more before going to pre-op, where we waited a good hour and a half before surgery.

The surgery took an hour and a half. An hour and a half in which I paced and ate my first food in 18 hours and tried not to think about how surgery is dangerous and sometimes people die in even simple surgeries. It was 90 minutes of being alone without my daughter to be brave for. My nose did some over-refloating.

I was so relieved when the surgeon came to tell me it was over and April was doing great. She had a couple of pins in her arm and was wearing a hard splint, a kind of temporary cast while her arm does the initial healing. We went back up to her room and took a nap before moving from sipping water to eating jello to snarfing down scrambled eggs and bacon.

She pronounced it "very jello-y" and said it tasted "like orange"

She was discharged around 6 on Saturday evening, and my heart was just about full to over-refloating with relief and gratitude for modern medicine. She'll have this splint for a week before we go to the orthopedic clinic for follow-up x-rays and to remove the pins. Apparently pin removal is done in the office and hurts no more than a shot. It seems hard to believe, so I'll let you know if that really is the case.

April is on the mend but still hates telling everyone about what happened. She went back to school today and I had to go in with her to answer her schoolmates' questions while she hid behind me. All the attention bothers her, but she'll probably miss it, at least a little, when her splint is off for good.