The Mommy Daddy

Wow, it’s been one whole month since I last posted. That’s a record. It’s real easy to let life get in the way and upset your routine. Anyway, a lot has happened and I’m not just referring to the holidays. I’ll start with the most recent .

WHAT NOT TO SAY

Last Tuesday I was sitting at my computer, working, my three year old son Matthew was playing games on his computer, when I got a phone call. It was the triplet’s school nurse and they told me that Rose was in the office complaining that her shoulder hurt.

“What happened?”, I asked.

They said that she fell off of one of the playground equipment setups they have. She landed on her shoulder.

“Was she OK?”

She couldn’t see anything, not even a bruise. The playground is covered with that really squishy kind of rubber so that must’ve absorbed a lot of the impact. They checked for a concussion, she seemed to be OK.

“Send her back to class,” I said.

I didn’t think anything of it. Their days are only till noon so I’d pick her up in an hour anyway. Fifteen minutes later I got another call.

“Rose was lethargic and still complaining about her shoulder,” said the voice on the phone.

“I’ll be right there.”

So, I packed up Matthew and drove to the school. I met Rose’s teacher on the way in and she told me that she insisted on calling me back because she saw Rose take the fall. Rose fell head first and, at the last minute, tucked her head so that her shoulder took the full force of her fall.

“How far did she fall?”, I asked. Up until that point I thought it had been off of something close to the ground. I was wrong. She fell off of one of the high climbing setups that they have.  It wasn’t a slide down a ladder or, trip and fall, type of deal. It was a full blown swan dive onto the playground floor!

I found Rose sitting in the office, with her brothers,  waiting for me. I signed the form for early release and we all immediately went to Urgent Care. Rose couldn’t even hold her shoulder up level. It was very obvious something was wrong.

But she wasn’t complaining about any severe pain. She just said it ached.

We got in to see a pediatrician, he did a couple of tests on her and then sent us off to Radiology.  Rose didn’t even whimper or anything. She just followed orders , droopy left shoulder and all. The clinic has a really hi-tech setup. All the X-Ray equipment is digital and the results are instant, no film anymore.

So the radiologist invited us in to the control room to see the pictures of Rose’s bones, we all huddled around the screen, up came the picture and there it was; a shot of a beautifully clean break in my daughter’s Clavicle.

“Oh my God,” I say without thinking. “She did break it!”

What an idiot I was. As soon as she heard the word break, her face contorted into an expression of shock, fear and pain and she started balling her head off! She was inconsolable! I couldn’t turn off the tap!

By the time we got her home, arm in a sling, she was still blubbering.

What really shocked me was that the Doctor only put her arm in a sling. He said that they don’t do casts for that kind of break anymore. All they do is try and keep it immobilized and the bones would mend very fast.

“For every 6 weeks it takes an adult to heal, a child only needs about two”, he said.

What a miracle the human body is.

Anyway, Rose settled into her role as an “injured Sparrow” very quickly and started receiving cards and gifts from friends and relatives almost immediately.