After the Fall

My mother-in-law's worst fears have been confirmed. We are lax parents whose inattentiveness has caused bodily harm to one of her precious grandsons. Worse yet, it was Matthew, her favorite, who suffered the consequences.

I'm just glad it happened on Tab's watch, not mine.

It's funny: the boys spend hours every week running around, jumping off, and climbing through mazes and jungle gyms at the playground and have never yet suffered more than a scrape or bruise. Tonight, however, Matthew walked into the backyard, tripped over a brick, and pitched face forward onto the grass with his left arm beneath him.

Although the poor kid was in a lot of pain, we thought at first he had only sprained his arm. There was little swelling and he still had some movement. I put ice on it, gave him some children's ibuprofen for the pain, and told him to sit for awhile. When he was still crying after fifteen minutes, I began to reconsider.

To make matters worse, as far as Matthew was concerned, Stephen and Daniel were whooping it up in the backyard. "They're having fun out there!" Matthew said plaintively, listening to his brothers' shouts of glee. Without me! was his unspoken cry.

"Do you want to go out there with them?"

He nodded. I escorted him to the back porch, but Tab brought him back in a few minutes later.

"My arm still hurts!" Matthew cried.

I called and left a message with our pediatrician's service. She called back a few minutes later and agreed we should take him to the emergency room for X-rays.

They never show this on ER I thought to myself as I sat in a dingy little office, balancing Matthew on my knee and signing form after form. Nor do they show the patients' interminable wait, the shuffling from waiting room to triage back to the waiting room to the registration office back to the waiting room again and finally to the curtained examining area. Where we waited some more before being sent to radiology for X-rays and then back to the examining area to await the doctor. I'd brought a few of the boys' library books with us; I ended up reading them to Matthew three times each while we waited.

Matthew was wonderful throughout the entire experience. The triage nurse had rigged up a temporary sling which helped protect his arm from accidental jarring. I held him on my lap for the X-ray, draping the lead apron around both of us. He didn't complain even though I could tell the technician's positioning of his hand on the plate hurt.

Finally, the emergency room doctor arrived. She told us the films showed that Matthew had broken both bones in his wrist. I must have looked aghast because she hastened to assure me that this was a "good" break. "The bones are not broken all the way through but buckled. If you have to break your wrist, this is the kind of break you want."

OK, doc. Whatever you say.

A nurse arrived a little later to splint Matthew's arm. "This will immobilize the arm until you can get to an orthopedic doctor to have a cast put on," he said, placing Matthew's arm against a narrow board and deftly wrapping it layer after layer of gauze. "There you go, Matthew. How's that feel?"

"Better," Matthew answered.

It was after 11 by the time we got home. Matthew was eager to get to bed and frustrated by his inability to undress himself with one arm. I had to help him get in the bathroom, too, telling myself I'd better get used to doing these things again, at least for awhile.

After he'd gone to bed, Tab and I looked at each other and sighed.

"This is the first trip to the emergency room with one of our boys, but it won't be the last--you can count on that," Tab said.

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