pardon me while i type one handed. my son is snuggled against my tummy, and i'm holding him a bit tighter tonight. i've heard the saying that goes something like, "having a child is like letting your heart walk around outside your body." i thought i knew what that meant the day my daughter was born. then, when she had her first bout of dehydration and daddy took her to the e.r. while i stayed home with baby brother. i thought i knew that saying's meaning then, too.
of course, there are times when they are so happy that my heart wells up with pride and joy for them. but today i experienced the terror of worrying about my baby on a new level.
the kids had been angels when we went the voting poll, and they were pretty good when we went to lunch at a local restaurant on the square. (little man was so filled up on pretzels and goldfish that he was not hungry, but he did not have any fits, so that qualifies as a success in my book.)
just before two o'clock we pulled into the apartment complex, checked the mail, and instead of parking and going inside for naptime, i decided to go to the playground for a few minutes.
i thought b was just behind me when i turned around to look at something that caught my eye. the reality was that he was straight on sissy's tail as she made her way to the monkey bars. at the top of a four foot high platform...
*****
11 pm 11/2: Both kiddos are in bed sound asleep.
As I remember... as I said, I had turned around for a second, thinking B was running near me. THUD. cry. "Oh, S***!!!!! God, no!" My heart raced as I ran toward my baby boy, who was face down under the monkey bars. Scared to pick him up, but dying to at the same time, I rolled him over to lay him flat. He looked at me, but his stare was rather blank. I noticed scrapes on the side of his forehead and above his cheekbone, but the bleeding was minimal. He closed his eyes. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed 911. Their staff was superb, staying on the line with me, helping me calm down. The 20 seconds or so his eyes were closed seemed like an eternity, but when he opened them he reached up and hugged my neck tightly. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, but was still worried. 911 lady kept talking to me as we waited for the ambulance, H stayed close, asking if her baby brother was ok but also somehow staying really, really calm and collected while Mommy went back and forth from near hysterics to deep breaths and hopefulness. A little 6 year old boy had come over from his apartment to play and matter of factly told me that he fell off a play gym once. (His mom was on her patio across the parking lot and she came over to see what was going on, too.) We heard the ambulance near, they pulled up on the other side of the park area and H ran over to show them where we were. The 3 EMT's/Firefighters came over, immediately began checking B's vitals and asked what happened. At that point, B was sitting in my lap facing out, eyes open but very quiet. He kept blinking as though he would fall asleep, and he was getting less responsive. When they first arrived, there was a possibility that I could drive him to the county hospital with a pediatric unit 20 minutes away, but we quickly determined he needed to go to the Children's Hospital of Atlanta for care. So one of the EMT's grabbed H's car seat out of our car (which was next to the play ground, thank God, as we had driven there in stead of parking and walking over from our building). B's vitals remained strong, but he kept falling asleep, and it wasn't long before he would not open his eyes when tickled. Of course, it was also his nap time, and the EMT tried to encourage me to be hopeful since I had told him that B was a heavy sleeper. However, I knew this was not my little bouncing baby boy's normal behavior. And it terrified me. He remained basically unresponsive, or extremely limited in his responses, for the next 2 hours or so.
In the ambulance, Big Sis sat in her car seat and observed, mostly. I had tried to call 2 local friends, and succeeded in texting one to share the news, but there just wasn't time to leave big sis anywhere. And with Daddy out of state, I also felt like she needed to be with us. She thought it was cool that we were flying past all the other vehicles on the highway. The EMT's and I kept trying to awaken him, but his sleep seemed to grow deeper... until they stuck him to give him an IV port just in case. Then he whimpered a little and said "ouch." While I hated to see him hurt, I knew that at least he was feeling things.
The rest of the evening is a blur. Hospital staff took H to another room to color and do some crafts, B had already been assigned a tag bracelet, and he was whisked into triage, followed shortly by a CT scan of the head and a x-ray of the c-spine. This is where Hope crept in. My boy began to come back to me. In the CT room, a projector displayed a rotating sea-life scene on the ceiling above the table. "Look, mama. Fish. Water." He pointed to the ceiling. He was laying still. The only time my 2 year old boy lays that still is when he sleeps. When we moved down the hall to X-ray, he saw pumpkin and cat decals on the ceiling and identified them. I explained to him that a big camera was going to take his picture, and asked him to look at the camera and say "cheese." He kept talking about the pumpkin, the cat, and the camera. For this scan, they even had to repeat a lateral film because he had moved his head while I helped hold his arms down flat.
His improvement continued while we waited in his ER room. He laid flat far longer than I had expected him to, but soon, he began rolling around. He was wearing a neck brace as a precaution, and it was not very long until he sat up. Shortly after that, Aunt Sara arrived, having survived rush hour traffic in Atlanta. Oh, how grateful I am for her tonight.
The nurses came in periodically to check his vitals, and he became increasingly more normal. His movement set of the equipment alarms. He pretended the TV remote was a telephone and called the nurses station for help by pressing the button as he talked on his "phone." He sang "the wheels on the bus go round and round." While he likes that song, I can't help but wonder if it because he knew he was in an ambulance (because we told him so) or rolling down the hall on a cot.
Sitting up-with his neck brace on- in his ER room
Finally, the doctor came in and authorized his release as his test were fine, and not a moment to soon. He showed her how he could stand on his bed and step up onto the railing while he hugged mommy's neck... with all his wires still attached.
As we drove home and the sky darkened, he sang "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" from his cousin's car seat. Big Sis fell asleep pretty quickly, but in the parking garage she told Aunt Sara that she did not like it when her brother got hurt.
(Thank God for babies in the family! We did not grab his car seat when we took Sissy's.) As we waited in the drive through at Chik-fil-A, he exclaimed "chicken!" And of course, when we pulled into our complex, he asked for the playground. I asked him if the playground was fun or scary. "Fun." But at one point I think he also said "Playground hurt."
As the evening progressed, we ate our dinner, watched a movie, and he began to play with the teddy bear he was given at the hospital (while at the hospital he was not really interested in it.) He wanted me to put his neck brace (yeah, I kept it) on the bear, along with the disposable pressure cuff the nurse had put on it. Then he told the bear to "wake up!" just like we had been telling him in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, when he had that glassy eyed look on his face (if his eyes were open at all).
He set his teddy bear on his pillow, then climbed into bed next to it.
Later, as I tucked Big Sis into bed and sang "You are my sunshine" as one of her lullabies, she changed the lyrics to "please don't take my brother away." My strong, brave girl did so well through this ordeal, too.
Sara's here with me tonight, I am so glad for the company. Daddy will be home on Friday as planned, since the test results were ok and our little man is already back to his old self.
****
Thank you to everyone who heard the news through the grapevine and prayed for us today. Four feet is a really long fall for a 2 year old, and Someone must have heard and softened his fall.
*****
23.5 hours later
11/3/10
My boy is in my lap again, chattering away, pretending a mini slinky is a camera and saying, "cheese." A few minutes ago, he and H were racing hobby horses around the apartment, and before that he was twirling in circles, throwing himself on the ground laughing and exclaiming, "hurt! mama! hurt" But then repeating the cycle. This is completely normal play for him.
God is so good!
