Caroline's week started out well. She got to wear her new sequined, glittery outfit from Grandma and Grandpa. When she first saw it, she squealed, "I love Grandma and Grandpa. They know me so well." She loves her some sequins.
Caroline had also been crying a lot earlier in the week. We bought Josiah a growing older/puberty book. He's been reading it with Todd and, so far, they've only read the parts that talk about hygiene. I bought Caroline's equivalent book at the same time just to have it on hand for the future. She's asked about the book and how her body is going to change and she's been crying about it ever since. I have kept it
very G-rated (You'll get taller. You'll have leg/underarm hair.). One night before bed she was crying and saying how she liked birthdays because she likes presents and cake, but she doesn't want to get older. These were genuine big, fat tears. And it's not like I made the growing up process sound unpleasant, she's just not keen on the idea at all. Usually these conversations devolve into how she doesn't know how to change a baby's diaper and how can she have a baby if she can't take care of it? I told her I would help her learn how to do that, but it is always more tears. We need to borrow a diaper from a friend with a baby so she can practice the technique on her dolls. The poor girl.
CC went really well this week. After CC some families meet back up at a playground just down the road. We went last week and the kids wanted to go back again this week. So we went. A now much regretted decision. The kids had been playing for a while, when all of a sudden, Caroline was on the ground screaming. She got up and walked over to me, but it was clear that something was definitely wrong. Her reaction was not the normal falling-down-I'm-in-pain reaction. She was holding her arm and said she had fallen from the monkey bars. We packed up our stuff and headed to the car, propping up Caroline's arm on a blanket to keep it cushioned. Every bump and turn of the car elicited whimpers and cries from her seat. We dropped the boys off at home with Todd and headed for the ER. It is always the debate - ER or Urgent Care. A quick google search showed that urgent cares don't cast arms, they only splint them and send you to an orthopedist. That seemed like one too many steps if she had truly broken her arm, so we headed for Texas Children's. As soon as we walked to the check-in desk, the nurse touched her arm all over, discovered the pain was in the elbow region and immediately got her a sling. We went right into triage where the nurse showed Caroline a poster on the wall with the numbers 0 - 10 with faces over the numbers ranging from a smiley face to a crying face. The nurse asked her which number was her pain. Caroline looked at the poster for a long time, genuinely looking at it and trying to figure it out. Then she answered the nurse with, "Does it only go up to 10?" The nurse answered in the affirmative. "Then a 10." Oh the poor thing. The nurse gave her some Motrin at that point and ordered an x-ray panel of her left arm. Knowing the results now, it is amazing she didn't scream out in pain as they manipulated her arm to get the pictures they needed. She had tears in her eyes and audibly said it hurt or "no, no, no," but she was still pretty calm all things considered.
After x-rays, we spent a fair amount of time in the waiting room, coloring pictures of Frozen's Elsa. As long as the arm stayed still, she really seemed okay. Then we were called back to a room so that the doctor could go over the x-ray results. First she did a physical exam and touched her arm all over asking, "Does this hurt? Does this hurt?" every inch down her arm. Then she looked at me and said, "Well, her physical exam is pretty good, but it doesn't match the x-rays at all."
Oh no. She broke her arm and she broke it badly. There was a fracture going up the humerus, another one going down the radius, and three separate breaks in the distal head of the humerus - the little ball area near the elbow. Not a clean break by any stretch of the imagination. So then we got to wait for the
surgical consult to come in and tell us how they were going to put her back together. She was going to need pins to keep the bones in place and be in a cast for four weeks with the pins in, then several more weeks after the pins were out. They splinted her arm to keep it from moving too much and took us to a room upstairs for the night. At this point it was close to 10:30/10:45 p.m. They had given Caroline morphine before they splinted her so that it would hurt less. She was not a fan of morphine - it made her head hurt a lot for the first few minutes. It also did
not make her sleepy in the slightest. So, at 11:00 p.m. in her room, after the nurses had all left, Caroline was lying in bed and talking to me for nearly an hour. I was so, so tired. I'm pretty sure I fell asleep before she did. I told her I wanted to take a picture of her in her splint for Todd and the boys to see. She smiled at first, but then said she shouldn't smile because it hurt, so she did a pained face!
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| My chatty roomie. |
We were told that surgery would be first thing in the morning, which was great considering she couldn't eat or drink. Now, when she had surgery two years ago, at a different hospital, they always had a group of doctors making their rounds at like 7:00/7:30 a.m. So, to me, first thing in the morning was 7:00 a.m. This hospital was not exactly on the same schedule. The surgical PA came in at 9:30. We got down to the pre-op area and waited another hour. At least it gave her time to do the TV down there. She really liked the touchscreen and the games she could play on it. She was very hungry all morning long. She wanted Cheetos, a sub sandwich from Jersey Mike's, and pizza.
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| Her favorite TV. |
The surgery itself lasted about an hour. This surgery was a closed reduction, meaning they did not cut her open. They used x-rays to see where to place the pins and set the bones that way. The surgeon came out and told me it all went well and that she was in recovery. He even gave me some pictures of her elbow both before and after the pins were in place. Then he said it would be about ten minutes before they came to get me so I could see her. Literally 59 minutes later they came to get me. I was giving it one more minute before I asked what was taking so long. When I
did get to see her, they said she had been sleeping for a long time. I think this may have been a function of my conversation with the anesthesiologist in pre-op. I had mentioned that after her surgery two years ago, she woke up incredibly mad/agitated/inconsolable. So much so that they gave her two morphine shots to try and calm her down. (I remember very vividly that her four-year-old self was adamant that she wanted to walk to the bathroom by herself, which is frowned upon in the post-anesthesia wards.) So this anesthesiologist may have upped the sedatives. Not long after she woke up and drank some Gatorade, we were getting her dressed and getting discharged.
That evening, she did fairly well. Though her arm hurt, she was eating and drinking. She even got her Jersey Mike's sub for dinner and ate the whole thing. After she finished it, she asked Todd for the other half. Unfortunately for her, it was a kid's meal and there was no other half. Bedtime was when things started to get rough. She could not figure out how to get comfortable. We had four pillows in her bed and blankets to help prop her body and arm up. (We were told to keep it elevated.) She finally fell asleep only to be awakened at 2:30 a.m. Saturday morning with her arm in a lot of pain. I got her some medicine, but then she couldn't fall back asleep and half an hour later she was throwing it all up. This was the trend for the rest of the morning. She threw up five times in total - the maximum allowed before we had to call the doctor. She took a mid-morning nap and a second long nap in the afternoon. She woke up from that second nap as a totally different kid. She was alert, happy, and ready to eat and drink. She's been doing much better ever since. Our CC director even stopped by and brought her a Barbie, which made her really happy that someone would do that.
Throughout the entire ordeal at the hospital, nearly every medical person we came in contact with said that monkey bars are the number one injury they see. They cannot believe they still put them on playgrounds. Lovely. (#2 was trampoline injuries.)
Saturday evening, Josiah made a no-bake cheesecake all on his own. We were able to have some after dinner, but Josiah insisted that he cut the slices. He cut mine first. It was probably the smallest piece of cheesecake I have ever been served. Todd was given his skimpy slice next. Then Josiah cut his own slice, a significantly larger portion. Caroline really wanted some, but knowing dairy isn't the best on a sensitive stomach, I only let her have a bite. One bite. She wasn't happy. Meanwhile Henry was eating an ice cream cone. Why? Cheesecake is, and I quote, "too cheesy." ↑ See the empty area? That was my puny slice.
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| Not happy with a bite. |
This morning the kids and I stayed home from church, but Caroline has been walking around a lot more. She's going up and down the stairs and eating real meals. She's not very happy about the cast still and says her arm feels cracked. The cast is very heavy and she won't let it hang at all. She either has the arm in a sling or she is holding the cast with her right hand. Though she's nonweight-bearing with her left arm, she
is allowed to let it be free. It may be a while before she gets comfortable with that. It is very heavy for her. This week, we go back to the doctor's office to get it recasted. Currently she has a cast on it, but they cut it in half to allow for swelling. She'll get another cast put on top of her current one, which is going to be tough because that's just added weight! She, of course, picked pink. If they had a rainbow color, she would have totally gone for that.
So, we'll be taking it easy this week and taking each day as it comes. We will also never be getting on monkey bars ever again.
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