Stitches. Not How I Planned To Spend Our Saturday

 

So today the little boys were supposed to spend the day with Bugga while my husband and I went to the local ski area to cheer on our 8 year old in his ski race.  We both volunteer for the club (I'm the secretary and he's an assistant coach)  so we had responsibilities.  But just as we were getting ready to head out the door, the baby fell and busted his lip open.  It peeled back the lip, creating a loose flap of skin.  So I made a quick phone call to let the ski club know I wouldn't be up right away, and headed up to the clinic.

 It didn't really seem to bother him much, and the bleeding had pretty much stopped by the time we got there.  I debated even taking him in, thinking it would be $100 to tell me I was over-reacting.  Not so.  He needed stitches, and they wanted me to come back three hours later, after their urgent care hours were done.  He was going to need to be sedated.

So we went back to the clinic at 11:30, and they kept him there until 1:30.  He was given sedation drugs - ketamine - known on the streets as "special k" -  but not knocked completely out.  He did really well, even if he does look really sad in these pictures.  These were taken while he was drugged out and not making connections.  The picture above reminds me of one I saw in a book about the holocaust.  Spooky.  And heart breaking.

 It took five stitches to get him all put back together.  We have to go back Wednesday to have them taken out... hopefully without sedation.

They had him all wrapped up tight so we wouldn't have to try to hold his arms down.  But once the drugs kicked in, he was pretty calm.  The worst part for him seemed to be the shot for the pain killer, which they gave in the top of his leg.

Starting to wake up.  He was so wobbly at first - felt like a bag of jello.  Then he was kind of freaking out because everything felt weird.  He couldn't sit up but really wanted to.  He would just fall over.  Poor guy.  He was also kind of funny.  He was talking about a car, which he had been playing with right before the procedure.  Then he wanted to take the pulse-ox off his toe, but had to leave it on, so I was showing him the light on his toe.  He leaned way forward and stared at it like, "Dude, there's a light on my toe..."  Then we switched to counting toes, and he would giggle and repeat in a very drugged slur, "three, four!"

It was all good in the end.  He got to eat two popsicles. He finished the first one and said, "Want pop" so they got him another one. He managed to drip all over the place because his lip was numbed and he was really drooly.  He kept wiping his belly with a kleenex - like you would with a washcloth in the bathtub.  He was very thorough.  Even scrubbed his armpit and back ... with the sticky kleenex.  Definitely gonna need a bath when he can sit up straight.  He's napping now :)

Anyway, I'm so thankful that this little guy is okay.  Don't know what I'd do if anything happened to my little guys ... any of them.  Or my big ones :)

It's been just a horrible week here in our little county.  We've had all sorts of bad stuff happening.  My husband's aunt has had gallbladder problems - requiring several trips to the hospital. A 90+ year old lady died after being hit by a forklift at our local grocery store.  I feel horrible for the manager, who was driving it.  He's a really nice guy, and it sounds like he's taking it really hard. There was a really bad wreck at the other end of the county that night that critically injured a guy who is our age, whom we know.  His mother is my husband's aunt's sister.  Then the next morning a guy froze to death here in town.  On the evening of Valentine's Day, an 18 year old committed suicide. Then after I got home today I heard on the scanner that a 16 year old was injured in the local "one-lunger" race (vintage snowmobiles).  He has a punctured lung and they are in the process of life-flighting him now.  Just talked to my mother-in-law, and he is a distant relative too, up here from Cheyenne by himself (a 6+ hour drive) - his parents home in Cheyenne, and they're life-flighting him to Idaho Falls (another 3 hours farther away).  So I guess our stitches really aren't as bad as some others have it.  I'm just wondering when all this will stop.