Claire's nemesis
She naturally started crying immediately and I scooped her up for some comforting as it looked like a particularly nasty face-plant. It wasn't until we went into the kitchen to get "boo-boo fish" (a Nemo ice pack) that we noticed she was bleeding profusely from a cut over her right eye and that my shirt was soaked with blood.
We took her to her pediatrician's office, which has staff there until 8:00. Carlos, the P.A. on call, took a look at her cut and cleaned it. He said if she was a boy they'd glue it together and it would be fine, but since she's a girl and would care more about a scar over her eye, he recommended we take her in for stitches. (Our neighbors have been given similar advice. Interesting. I think I'd want my boy stitched up, too.) They gave Claire a bracelet and a sheet of stickers and sent us to After Hours Pediatrics for the stitching.
The cleaned cut
A 25-minute car trip later, we arrived at AHP and got all checked in. Their waiting room is a fabulous play room, so Claire settled in to play with toys, watch TV, and read books until they called us back. Then Nurse Renee put some numbing gel on her cut with a sticker to hold it in place, and we read books for another 20 minutes until that kicked in. She came back and washed out the cut with a syringe and eye cup, which Claire did NOT like at all. (She's not a big fan of being squirted with water.)
Cut with numbing gel and sticker over it
Then Dr. Sullivan came in to do the stitches... Again, Claire didn't like it, mainly because she could see what they were doing too much out of her right eye. I asked her afterward if it hurt or if it was just scary, and she said, "It was just scary." She did get two Popsicles and a Littlest Pet Shop sticker out of the experience, so was generally content and very brave about the whole thing. We didn't leave until 10:30 or so, and actually, oddly enough, the most traumatic part of the whole evening was putting her in her pajamas around 11:00. She was so tired and strung out that major crying and kicking ensued. (While normally I'd give in and let her sleep in her clothes, they were bloody. Wasn't going to happen.)
Unhappy and tired but stitched up
Today she seems no worse for the wear, and has been showing people her boo-boo and telling the story: "I go crash. I go, 'doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-phhht.'" [our description of whenever she falls down - it makes her laugh and eases the crying] "I run for my milk and fall down."
Brave girl the next morning with a little puffiness but not bad
Overall, we feel very fortunate that 1) she didn't hurt her actual eye, and 2) that we've made it 2 1/2 years without a trip to any sort of urgent care facility. Thankfully, she's not an accident-prone girl for the most part.
We go back to AHP Monday afternoon to get the stitches out, so I'm sure she'll enjoy telling her war story on Monday to her friends at school.
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Poor little sweetie. This reminds me of something that happened to Nancy when she was no bigger than Claire. We had gone out with our dad as he was irrigating on our farm while our mom was gone to a meeting at church. We two sisters were playing beside an irrigation ditch and Nancy fell in near a cement headgate and the water current pulled her right into it head first. All that was above the water was her little butt. Fortunately, my dad was right there and he pulled her out by the seat of her pants. (I couldn't have been more than 6, so I wasn't much of a help.) The cement headgate had gashed her head right near her hairline when she fell in. As you now know, head wounds bleed like crazy and hers was no exception. My dad piled us into our old pickup and headed back to the house. My clearest memory besides seeing Nancy's bottom bobbing in the irrigation ditch is of her standing on the bathroom counter in a somewhat frilly dress with blood streaming down her face while my dad tried to clean her up a little. The frilly dress seems funny in retrospect, but of course he had to take her wet clothes off and take her to the hospital. I guess he thought she should be dressed well for the hospital. Or maybe it was faster to put on a dress than pants and shirt. In any case, we all trundled to the hospital (about 16 miles away) in our old farm truck and got back before Mom was even home from church. Apparently, when she got home we were in bed asleep and my dad had an eventful evening to talk about. No cell phones then, obviously, so there wasn't any good way to reach her and she found out about it when she got home. You'll have to ask Nancy to show you her scar sometime, if you haven't seen it already. It's not noticeable because her hair mostly covers it, but when she pulls back her bangs, it's still there and pretty sizable.
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