This weekend started like any other, looking forward to geeking out Friday evening with a table of friends, playing Age of Worms, our D&D campaign. If you don't know what that is, it's probably best if I keep you in the dark. lol
Anyhow, so I'm just finishing up dinner, like literally pulling it out of the oven, when my kids come in from outside crying up a storm. Great, I think to myself. One of them either A.) fell on the rocks, B.) fell on the porch, or C.) got their feelings hurt by OH MY GAWD!!
I turn around to look, and my second daughter, Miriam, is holding a bloodied hand, literally dripping on the floor. Immediately, I pull her to the faucet to see what's going on, when she starts screaming as soon as the water touches her wound. I take a look at it.
Holy crap.
Her fingernail is crooked. She has a gash on the side of the tip of her finger that is DEEP and looks as if it goes down to her bone. Due to the crooked fingernail, I yell at my oldest daughter to get DH--I think her sister broke her finger.
DH comes upstairs and offers to take her to the urgent care, which is a little ways away, but the co-pay is significantly cheaper than the ER. Anyhow, after thanking him up and down (because I once spent half the night in the ER with our youngest daughter for Walking Pneumonia... No fun), we wrap her hand in paper towels and away they go.
By this time, I'm interrogating my kids. What happened?
Apparently, she got her right-hand pointer finger caught in the back door of our daylight basement. The kids are NOTORIOUS for slamming the darn thing--it's a heavy door, the thing slams like a meat locker. I've told them time and time again not to slam it, well, more like yelled at them time and time again. I was at the point where I was >< this close to locking the door and telling them to only go outside through the upstairs sliding door to our deck. I literally had that thought Friday afternoon. I should have acted on it.
So, in the meantime, DH is having a hell of a time. The urgent care we always go to is GONE. Disappeared. When the hell did that happen?!? Geebus, where is there another one? It's already like 7:45pm, and they're only open until 8pm. I quickly think of another one that is fairly close, and away he goes. He calls me a little while later saying the nurse took a look at Miriam (because she was crying and bleeding, despite the fact there were many people already in the waiting room) and went to get the physician. He says something to the effect of, "Yup, you need to go to the ER."
Mother fu#$*@%"!
Anyhow, he decides to go to St. Vincent's, which is farther away than our local ER, but has a better pediatrics section, according to the doc. So off they go--again. Poor Miriam, it's been like an hour and a half since she hurt herself and she still hasn't been seen by anyone.
But the ER at St. V's is PACKED. DH said they gave him a *pager* to wear, like you get in crowded restaurants. There was literally about 100 people in the waiting room. In order to get Miriam in sooner, DH decided to have her seen by the nurse practitioner, not the "doctor". Since we all know how ER's work, I'll spare you the gory details and tell you that my daughter did, in fact, break her finger. She cracked the tip of her bone and pulled out half of the cuticle on her fingernail. In fact, they told DH she almost severed her fingertip. If the door had slammed any harder... **shudder**
They stitched her up (which is a whole other story) and told us she needs to see a plastic surgeon on Monday. The reason being, I guess when you rip out your fingernail at the cuticle (the root) it doesn't quite grow back right, if at all. They didn't want to pull it out the rest of the way, because there was a good chance she might never have a fingernail left on that finger if they did--for the rest of her life. She's only 7, folks. The plastic surgeon will be able to tell me tomorrow what he thinks we should do. Worst case, she loses a nail, perhaps for life. Best case, she can keep her nail, but it might have a funky ridge on it.
And now, she'll have a cool scar to tell war stories with.
Aside from all this, she has a splint on her finger, Tylenol with Codeine, a medication to stop infection, and a great attitude. She's a real trooper. I think she must have a high tolerance for pain. Despite driving around half of Hillsboro and Beaverton, she wasn't crying and wailing the entire time, and really only cried when they stitched her.
The really sad thing is, she had asked me (before this all happened) when dinner was going to be ready because she said she was starving. Then, of course, she hurts herself right before dinner and rushes off, only to wait hours and hours for someone to get their butt in gear. DH stopped by Mickey D's on his way home, and she wolfed down her Happy Meal a little after midnight.
:(
Poor little thing.
~~Becka
