Paging Dr. Shepard

Caroline stayed home "sick" today. It was really just allergies in my expert medical opinion. And in case you didn't know, I used to want to be a doctor when I grew up, but enter Chemistry at LSU and well, we all know what happened. So, I think that qualifies me to make some medical diagnoses on my children,right? In any event, Caroline came to the office with me for the morning and she was really well-behaved and entertained herself and around 2:00 I decided that she had been through enough and it was time for us to head home.

After we got settled and I brought in all four loads of who-knows-what we lugged with us to work, I let Caroline watch a show on TV (which is a rarity for her during the week, so she was super-excited). I headed back to our room to change out of my work clothes and no sooner did I step foot in my room than I heard a loud boom and a scream. I mean loud. Complete with crying. And not the fake, I need a little attention crying.

I ran back to the living room to see Caroline standing next to the coffee table, holding her eye, screaming and crying like she was truly hurt. I pulled her hand away from her face to see a nice little half inch slit above her eye that was kind o gaping open and bleeding pretty profusely. Through her tears, she was able to tell me that she had been standing on the couch and fell off and hit her head on the coffee table. If she was a little older and more manipulative, she would now be telling me, "See Mom! Because you never let me watch TV, I was excited during my show that I jumped on the couch and fell off. You need to let me watch it more often and things like this won't happen." But I digress. After putting a tissue on the cut, my first thought was that this might need stitches, or at least the medical opinion of someone who did more than dream about med school. So, I called the doctor and she said that they couldn't do stitches at the office and because the cut was so close to her eye, we should probably get it checked out at the ER.

I had to drag Caroline into the car because when I said the word "hospital" to Jeff, it did not invoke scenes of good-looking doctors hanging out drinking coffee or performed complex life-saving brain surgery for our little girl. She was petrified and we prayed on the drive over to the hospital that everything would be okay and that she wouldn't be scared.

Once we got there she seemed fine and they called us back after a few minutes of waiting, which really wasn't bad at all, not what I was expecting. The nurse practitioner was wonderful and made Caroline feel so at ease, getting her information, and looking at her cut. We did have to wait a while for the doctor to make his way in because there was an emergency that they all had to attend to for a while. He did some things to her little injury that I won't explain because I'm not sure how to without grossing everyone out, but in the end he decided that the cut was a "clean cut": very straight, not in a spot she'll likely agitate, no insides coming out (yuck), and not profuse bleeding an hour after the injury - so no stitches for us!

I am really thankful because I wasn't quite sure how I was going to sit by and watch them give my child a shot right by her eye. And of course because I didn't want Caroline to endure all that goes in to getting stitches.

She seemed to be doing pretty well when she went to sleep tonight. She's dosed up on Tylenol and Motrin and sleeping as upright as an almost four year old can. They did tell us that Caroline will have one heck of a black eye for a couple of weeks. Which is really convenient because we'll be visiting with family who rarely see her this weekend and then her birthday and birthday party are next week. Works out really well! I guess in the future we'll look back on all of this and be able to say, "Oh, yeah. That picture must be from your 4th birthday party because, look, you've got the black eye." Always looking on the sunny side!