Lots and lots of blood...

How ironic is it that just a few weeks ago I sat poolside with a friend talking about her kid’s various injuries knocking on wood and thinking about how lucky I was to not have had to deal with that stuff … then…

Not even two hours after he got home from his vacation (see Nana’s guest – post) Dima and I took a nice walk and he went into the back yard while I came in through the garage. When I first saw him running toward the house screaming I was thinking – what now??? He can be dramatic at times… but this wasn’t just drama, there was lots and lots of blood dripping down his right arm and on the grass and on his shoes and on our floor. So I grabbed him and made him stick it under the kitchen faucet to wash it off while he was screaming about all the blood - by now I could see a gap in the flesh inside and below his knuckle as I grabbed gauze from our first aid kit (good idea to keep it in the kitchen pantry) and a clean towel and wrapped it around the finger I was hoping that MAYBE it wasn’t as bad as it looked at first and I sat him down and held his hand above his head to get it out of his sight and to try to stop the bleeding. I knew Chris was on his way home and I don’t know how long it took for him to get there but it seemed like a long time as I was just waiting and still holding out hope that I’d look at it again and it would be better than I first thought. No such luck. Once Chris got here I was spelling out h-o-s-p-i-t-a-l and s-t-i-t-c-h-e-s so Dima wouldn’t freak to get the severity of the situation across. Once Chris came out and said the word stitches Dima did freak out– he’d heard from someone at school that they really hurt and was really scared at that point. Chris said that maybe they’d be able to give him a cool butterfly bandaid instead. So we piled into the car me in the back with Dima– Josh was still with my parents, just as well so we didn’t have to deal with him trying to look at the cut and stuff. During the ride I noticed that when we weren’t saying much Dima started to cry so there’s me sitting there trying to keep Dima’s mind elsewhere so I found a golf score card in Chris’s car and showed the map of the course and asked again and again for details of his trip to the shore.

He did end up getting three stitches even though he tried his best to control the situation – not letting them wash it saying things like: “I’m going to lose all my blood and die”, “can you put the shot in the other hand?” - nice try…, “can I just get the bandaid?”- uh… no. The doctor did say that his behavior wasn’t too bad. I must say he was brave and actually watched the stitches as they went in. The doctor was great and once we all stopped using the word STITCHES Dima was good about going along with it all. We ended up breaking the steps down – I didn’t want to lie to him and just told him that it would be like getting a regular shot at the regular doctor and he was better then and watched the bubble form under his skin and laughed about it when he got the anesthetic. Once it was numb it was all down hill from there. He actually agreed that the bubbles the peroxide made were neat. He should being proud of himself because he handled most of it pretty well. He’s definitely proud that he’s got his first stitches. ( I’m hoping first… and last…) It wasn’t until we were on the way home that we noticed the blood all over his red shirt! Whew!!