A story.
See Daddy.
See Katherine.
See Daddy and Katherine play. See Katherine climb all over Daddy on the floor, while Katherine’s PC reboots.
Hear Katherine roll off of Daddy and bump her head on the coffee table.
Whack!
Hear Katherine start to wail. Hear Daddy make clucking consoling noises.
See Katherine turn to Daddy and reveal the huge, horrible, bleeding, awful, bloody, terrible, blood-gushing gash on her forehead.
Hear Daddy go homina-homina-homina …
So I swept her up, took her into the bathroom, dabbed at it with toilet paper. Blood continued to well.
This wasn’t just a trivial scratch sort of thing. It was deep, right at her left eyebrow, about an inch long.
When in doubt — call Margie.
The added advantage to calling Margie while she’s at work is that she has a host of medical personnel around her, ready to offer advice. The bottom line from them was that, as long as it stopped bleeding (BLEEDING!!!) it needed some sort of butterfly bandage to close up the wound, so that scarring (SCARRING!?!) would be at a minimum. Margie’s boss, a PA, suggested that she’d scar regardless, but little kids and faces heal quickly. In any case, it would be less traumatic (for everyone) than going into the clinic and getting it sutured.
Katherine was being a Big Girl by now, and had stopped her sobbing and wailing, and the bleeding had indeed subsided, so we went off to the store to get some butterfly bandages (and some Scooby-Doo bandages too). And we put them on, and she smiled, and laughed about it and went home and …
… and I think I can stop shaking now. She seems to have shrugged it off.
Wish I could.
Dave, I know exactly what that is like. Our Katherine (age 2) had a wound just like that in about the same spot. She did pretty well with the stitches, but I was sure I’d lose my lunch.
Little girls heal….parents, on the other hand, tend to carry that scare around for a long while.
In short:
Been there, done that, was waaaaay to freaked to buy the t-shirt.
I know all about that feeling, Dave. It happens to every parent, I think. Kids are just too spontaneous to second guess every moment.
http://marn.diaryland.com/lucky.html is my moment. I still get a knot in my stomach when I think about it, and it was well over 20 years ago.
Go have kids.
Yeeeeesh, Marn.
Nothing here nearly that bad, but that panicky ohmygodwhatwillIdo sort of feeling is probably analogous to what you felt.
What’s amazing is that it can happen anywhere. I mean, we didn’t have a Trench of Doom, a pit full of broken bottles, or a chipping machine just left humming along in the corner of the front yard by her tricycle path. It was just a small fall, on a piece of ordinary furniture. Short of wrapping her in cotton and stuffing her in a closet , I’m not sure what one can do but just try to keep alert and keep cool.
Don’t want to be a Marlin here …
Katherine, aside from being understnadably skittish about our replacing the butterfly bandages on her, doesn’t seem to be having any problems. Thank God.
Yeah, that’s the thing, you just can’t wrap them in cotton.
Isn’t it amazing, how completely and utterly vulnerable you are vis-à-vis your kids? Really, that was the one part I was NOT prepared for. I knew I would love her, I just didn’t realize how fiercely I would want to protect her, how badly I would feel when I couldn’t.
Even now, as she approaches her 25th birthday, I still want to smackdown anyone who causes her grief. Dave, I’m starting to see that having a kid amounts to signing up to a lifetime plan, eh.
Heh. Yeah, I don’t recall that being in the agreement I signed — oh, wait, I didn’t sign any agreement. Silly me. And she’s past warranty, so I can’t send her back.,.
Oh, well. Guess I’m stuck with her. Shucky-darn … 🙂
Having seen the horrible wound first hand, and I can only applaud the accuracy of the Usagi Yojimbo picture for it’s accuracy as regards the possible scar placement.
That said, when Katherine tripped over the power cord last night (MY power cord) and tumbled toward the corner of ANOTHER coffee table, leading the fall with her OTHER eyebrow, I had a similar moment of panic/guilt.
Mine is not as much the parental concern as it is the psuedo-uncle sometimes-babysitter terror that comes from accidentally harming someone else’s child and not incidentally losing Margie-snacks priviledges.
[Tongue firmly in cheek. :)]