Trip to the Emergency Room

How quickly a little game of "Toss Paige into a pile of pillows" can turn into so much more; 7 hours in the Emergency Room and a full arm cast. We finally came home yesterday morning at 3am. We're pretty exhausted.

How it happened? Pretty much like I said. Dave, Paige, and I were all playing on the bed, throwing Paige into a large pile of pillows. She, of course, was laughing hysterically, until one of the tosses went wrong and she landed with her arm twisted behind her back. For the next 20 minutes her arm was mostly limp, which terrified Dave as medical situations ran through his mind: partial paralysis, severed nerves, etc (I don't know them.)

We called our good friend who is head emergency room pediatrician and she walked Dave through a series of routine tests to determine if anything was dislocated. In the end her suggestion was the ER for radiographs. And so, for the first time in my life I found myself in the Emergency Room. Paige spent the 2 hours in the waiting room having a ball: laughing, twirling, and babbling to the other patients. I would have been tempted to take her home if not for the whimpering and refusal to put weight on her arm every time she fell down.

After several pointless tests and a lot of skepticism that anything was wrong, they finally made the radiographs and discovered she had fractured her left forearm in two different places. Seriously? It was a pile of pillows on a mattress for crying out loud!

Anyway, they had to sedate her to put on the cast (thus the first photo shows her still stoned) and I just cuddled her and sang to her the entire time.

The next morning, or a few hours later, whichever you prefer, I propped her up with pillows and let her have a luxurious morning watching Barney (2nd photo). I think she was entitled.