Emergency

Our family has decided to try and save for something. In order to do this, we have to have a smaller Christmas, and take every babysitting opportunity to get enough in time. Yesterday, MJ decided he wanted to help out even more than what he had already done. He went and got some card stock paper, made a little paper wallet, put 2 dollars and 4 cents, (the 4 pennies were to cover the cost of the card stock), and then in great excitement, he gave it to me to put toward the fund. My heart was just about to burst to see his generosity. (I do not pay my children very much. 2 dollars is the equivalent of what he would earn in almost a month if he worked really hard.) He felt so good about it, he too was bursting at the seems. (The other day, he paid his tithing, a total of 50 cents for the past 3 months or so of earnings. Just after he handed it to the bishop, he told me how good he felt inside. This kid is amazing.) But in his excitement, he was jumping up and down. At one point he put his hands on the counter to do an extra big jump of excitement, came up and hit his head smack on the corner of the cupboards. He went down hard and grabbed his forehead in pain. I was over to him in less than a second, took one look at his wound and freaked. I know, I am supposed to remain calm, but it didn’t happen on my end. The wound was a good one inch long and at least a quarter inch tall. It split it so far open, I could see his white skull very clearly, that is until the blood started coming. My reaction did not help my poor son. All my children started running around frantically. One grabbed me an ice pack, one a paper towel, another one grabbed my phone to call my husband, and the rest ran to their rooms to pray. I took RD with us to the hospital to help MJ hold on the ice pack and towel. SE stayed home with the younger kids. On the way to the hospital, MJ was saying he wished he could go back in time and change things. Then he said he wished it were just a bad dream. “It would be scary but at least I could wake up and it wouldn’t be real.” Seeing my baby hurt like that just about tore my heart apart.

One great thing about living in a small town with a hospital, the emergency room wait was a total of about 30 seconds - the time it took them to realize we were their. They got us right in, cleaned up the wound, (which extremely surprisingly had already almost stopped bleeding), numbed him up and started stitching him. The hole was so large I didn’t know how they were going to pull it all together. I guess there is a membrane that goes around the skull. It also had been severed. So they first had to pull that part together and stitch it. Then they pulled the inside of the tissue together and stitched that. Amazingly, they were able to pull the top part together and stitched him all up. He was home within 2 ½ hours. The stitch looks so much smaller than the hole used to be, thankfully.


When he got home, he was still literally shaking pretty bad. I think the shock of it all really got to him. But I am so grateful for hospitals. I am grateful for my husbands job and that it provides good enough insurance to cover things like this. But most of all, I am extremely grateful MJ is ok. With the way I reacted to this, I don’t know how I would be able to handle something much bigger. He is doing good this morning. I’m keeping him home from school just to make sure though. Maybe too, I just need that extra time with him to calm my little heart down also.