Last night I was sitting on the couch with Wolf, watching a movie. Hubby was in the kitchen getting stuff out to make some popcorn, and Bear was in there with him...dancing or something I guess. (Note that in our little apartment, this means he was two feet from Hubby, and 8 feet from me.) I don't know exactly what he was doing; nobody was looking at him. All of a sudden he fell down and started crying, so I ran over there. He was laying on his face on the floor (the chairs were pushed in to the table, so it's not like he had fallen off anything...) but when I rolled him over there was this big deep gash in his forehead. It was about 1cm wide, but I swear it looked almost that deep too...I could clearly see that it had gone well past the skin. Blood was starting to well up and I thought oh boy we're gonna have a gusher here. I mean, head wound, right? I hollered for Hubby to give me something to put pressure on Bear's head (yes, he was all of two feet away, but you try speaking quietly when your child has a gash in his head!).
Bear was crying but he wasn't shrieking like I would have expected for an injury that looked that bad, and he calmed down pretty fast. It didn't bleed as much as I expected...it actually didn't bleed very much at all. But it was deep, and at first look I was afraid he'd need stitches, so I told Hubby to call 911 (I would have just gone for urgent care if we lived anywhere else, but here there's nothing in the off-hours but 911--which gets the local EMT/health aid from home to come help out). Anyway, so we called her, and she said ok I'll meet you at the clinic in a minute...all the supplies are at the clinic, Bear was clearly fine to be moved, and it only took us a couple of minutes to walk there--we actually got there before her. Meanwhile Bear's head wasn't really bleeding anymore. We had realized by this point that he wasn't going to need stitches after all **sigh** but we didn't have anything fancier than bandaids at home, and we figured this needed some butterfly bandages/tape...
So she cleaned the blood off his forehead, and put tape on (which made him mad and he pulled the tape off). We tried again with the tape and again he was pulling at it...finally she just gave us the tape to bring home, and I brought him home and put him to bed and then put the tape on his head after he was asleep. In the middle of the night he woke up and was pulling at it again so I took it off for him...but his head does seem pretty well closed, it's not bleeding or anything...Really now it looks so small that part of me wonders why I was so worried last night, but i don't think I overreacted at the time. I mean, head wound--that's cause for worry, right?!
He looks ok now. He's acting totally normal and unbothered (he was acting that way last night too--the tape clearly bothered him a lot more than the actual gash!
I guess every little boy gets a scar on his head/face at some point, right? Hubby has one, Wolf has one, my dad does, my brothers all do...(heck, half my sisters do too)...
Still, I'm so relieved that it all turned out ok. It so didn't look like it was going to!
3 comments:
Yay, I'm glad it all turned out fine. Head wounds really *are* scary. They swell up so much bigger, bleed so much more....
Somehow it seems like my daughter is the head-wound-magnet in our family. When she was a new walker, she tripped on the way out the door and got a huge goose egg on her forehead. Before she was 2, she ran into a boy at a playground, he was bigger than her, his teeth cut open her forehead. She fell (at full speed) into the corner of a dresser within 5 minutes of getting into her grandparent's home after a full day of traveling. Each time was very scary, and the open wounds were very bloody. The last time, at her grandparent's house, we were lucky enough that SIL used to be an ER nurse - she told us it didn't need stitches, just some wound glue to keep the skin together, since it was a clean enough cut. But she does have more than her share of scars on her forehead, for a not-quite-5-year-old girl.
I'm knocking on wood for my life, here, because somehow, wild and carefree as my kids are, we still have never had to go to the ER or urgent care.
It sounds like off-hours wounds are interesting to deal with in Alaska - like all other things! Again, glad it all worked out okay, and looks like everything will be fine. I'm glad to hear that. Any idea what caused the gash in the first place?
oh so glad your little one is ok... we had a similar moment the other day when M face planted off the lounge chair... I hate having to make the decisions on what is and isn't needing urgent medical attention!
I wanted to get the better bandages but I was also concerned about concussion, and thought it was a good idea to take him in. You got frantic, you didn't overreact, you just got worked up because your baby was hurt, we all do it.
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