the accident

Ian gets his cast off tomorrow. I realized today that I took nary a photo, and didn't document the experience at all. Probably because I've been focusing on staying alive and keeping food down instead. Everything seems to fall apart around here when I have morning sickness.

Anyway, one particularly dreadful day last month (when J-P was out of town), the kids broke a glass jar full of epsom salt in the bathroom. I quickly swept it up and put it in the little bathroom garbage can. I put it in the (jack and jill) bathroom that separates the children's two bedrooms and shut the door. I put Max and Ian into bed, and then proceeded to put Ava to bed. While rocking her, I could hear Ian giggling and saying "Max, do you dare me to pee in the garbage?" I immediately threw Ava into her crib and ran into their room. He had gone into the bathroom, grabbed the glass-filled garbage can, and brought it into his room. I got there right before he started to pee. He knew he was in trouble, and in the process of pulling his pants up and getting back into bed, he tripped and his hand landed in the garbage can. It was dark and I didn't notice what had happened. I yelled at him to climb into bed. He was crying in bed, and I impatiently told him to stop crying so he wouldn't wake his siblings. He wouldn't stop so I climbed up (top bunk) to talk to him and that's when I saw the blood. Everywhere. I immediately started dry heaving and panicking. I was so sick and so tired I could barely stand up, much less deal with a crisis.

I knew I had to stop the bleeding, so I managed to do that. Then I looked at his finger to assess the damage of the cut, and it was bad. Like you could see the bone bad. That's when I lost it. I suppose the pregnancy hormones took over. I didn't know what to do so I called my mom. I was crying so hard that I couldn't talk for the first minute or so. I never call my mom crying, so I'm pretty sure she thought someone had died. I gained my composure and said "Mom, Ian cut his finger. I think I can see his bone, but I stopped the bleeding. Can I just put a band-aid on it and take him to the doctor in the morning?" Obviously she told me I needed to take him in, and I cried about how I was too sick and too tired...not to mention that I had no clue what to do with my other sleeping babes. "You call your neighbor, or your visiting teacher. If they can't help you call a babysitter." After a few calls I found a babysitter that could drive herself over so I didn't have to wake the other two. I whisked Ian (covered in blood--didn't have the strength to clean him off or change his PJ's) to urgent care.

I'm still not sure how I survived that night. After they prepped him they had to wait like 15 minutes to sew him up while I ran to the bathroom to empty the rest of the contents of my stomach. When I got back, the doc said "Come here mom, I want to show you where the tendon has been transacted before I sew him up..." Upon seeing it I literally blacked out and collapsed into a chair. The nurses scrambled to get me water and make sure that I would stay conscious, rather than paying attention to poor Ian.

Someone was definitely watching out for him that night. He did great. Content the whole time and didn't shed a single tear with any of the shots or papoosing. Such a tough kid. I still don't know how I made it through the subsequent visits to the hand surgeon in Denver, or the full day I had to spend in the hospital when he had his surgery. Here's to hoping his finger will still work when he gets the cast off tomorrow!