Sticks and Stones

On Saturday, after a long play day at the park, Larkin wanted one last slide across the zipline before heading home. She fell off at the end, landed wrong on one wrist and Wham! Pain!

This was clearly a worse injury than she has had in the past. Her arm was slightly swollen and the pain didn't disappear the way it usually does after a tumble. After a bit of talk about doctors and x-rays, Larkin really just wanted to go home and curl up on the couch to watch a movie. She kept her wrist on ice from the time of the accident (yay, coolers!) until she went to sleep and was even willing to take some of the detested "berry" flavored ibuprofen to bring the swelling down.

That night, she woke up crying in pain 5-6 times. The next morning, we were off to the doctor. Larkin, hardly slowed down by her injury, selected a fancy dress for the trip and asked me to do her hair before we left. The triage nurse was asking all the usual admitting questions and chatting with Larkin to set her at ease. She asked Larkin if she was all dressed up to go to church. Larkin, not yet quite warmed up to her usual chatty self, shook her head no. About 30 seconds later, while the nurse was entering data into her computer, Finn asked me in a stage whisper: "Jenny? What's church?"

Finn! Here we are at a doctor's office in rural Oregon where it has already been established that our kids don't go to school and get injured in fairly spectacular ways (Larkin had light abrasions on her shoulder and face from the same fall). The nurse turned to me with mouth slightly agape and waited for my answer. I kept it pretty short: "Church is a place where people with similar religious beliefs gather together."

The nurse nodded definitively, said "that's right!" and turned back to her computer. I felt like I had passed some kind of test. Later, she looked suitably chastened when she told Larkin that she was going to put "a little squeezy thing" on her arm. Larkin looked her in the eye and said plainly, "you're going to take my blood pressure."

They took 3 x-rays of Larkin's wrist. Finn and I stayed in the room with her but had to go behind the shielding wall with the tech while the actual x-rays were taken. We'd hang out with Larkin while he positioned her arm properly, dash behind the barrier for the scan, then go back out to Larkin. There was a lot of giggling all around-- even the tech got in on the high-speed action.

The results of the x-rays came back: Larkin has a Type 2 Salter-Harris Fracture. The only real low point of the doctor experience came when the doctor was showing us the x-rays (Finn had been *very* excited to see the pictures and I think the doctor was somewhat charmed by the kids who had been interested in learning more about every step of the process-- she took a lot of time talking to them about everything that was going on). Finn was somewhat awed by the x-rays and I think he had a hard time believing that those things in the image were inside Larkin's arm. Too quickly for me to realize what he was about to do and stop him, he picked up her hurt arm to examine it in wonder. He realized almost immediately what he had done, but it really hurt Larkin... those were the only tears through the whole doctor's office ordeal and some were shed by both Larkin and Finn.

I felt a little less guilty about not taking Larkin to the ER right away when the doctor told us that they would have waited to put a cast on it anyway due to the swelling the night before. We left with a hot pink cast, 2 new pairs of sandals and a bag of toys from the dollar store (there was a long wait at the doctor's office and the kids wanted to explore the shopping center until our turn).

After a couple of slow days, Larkin is now mostly back to her usual energetic self. She has decided she's going to learn to use her left hand to write her name and do mazes during the three weeks before the cast comes off.