Bridget's Ramblings: Paige's stitches-Jan 14, 2009

I apologize in advance for the quality of pictures. Right before the doctors started sewing her up I thought "Wait a minute! One of these days she's going to wonder how she got the scar on her face." So, I whipped out the old cell phone and snapped a picture. And as you can see I snapped a couple more during the process.

So here's the story:

That Wednesday night the kids were getting all rambunctious-as usual. Paige was twirling around in big circles making herself dizzy. I saw the circles were getting a little "wild" and had JUST said "Paige-you need to stop that". I seriously don't even know if the entire sentence was out of my mouth before she started to fall. I saw it happen and it still looks like slow motion in my mind's eye-but it obviously didn't happen slowly enough for me to react. The moment she hit the edge of the coffee table I knew without a doubt it was going to be ugly. In fact, I grabbed her and ran for a towel even before I saw blood--the impact was just that hard. Here's where the story gets a little comical. Not that it was funny at the time, but looking back it's really, really funny! I had Paige's "good" side pressed against my body and her cut covered by a towel. The other 3 kids were all crying because Paige was crying. I was holding pressure on Paige's cut and trying to calm the others down when Paige start screaming "I can't breathe!! I can't breathe!!" I ask why she can't breathe, but she's hysterical and doesn't answer. She just keeps saying it over and over. Kaeli starts screaming at me to call 911 because Paige can't breathe. I grab the phone and dial the numbers. At that point I took the towel off Paige's face to actually look at the damage and assess why she is having trouble breathing. As soon as I took the towel off the cut and held her face away from me to look she said "I can breathe now!"--I hang up the phone and dial my neighbor's number. It wasn't an emergency after all. I was just suffocating her with a towel and my body--lol. Thank goodness my neighbor was home and was able to come right over. I left with Paige and we headed to the after-hours clinic in town. Unfortunately, they wouldn't put the stitches in because the cut was too deep. Paige and I loaded back into the car and started our drive to the children's hospital which is about 50 minutes away. A few minutes into our trip I get a call from Steve (who arrived home 5 minutes after I left) informing me that the police had just left our house. Evindently, I didn't hang the phone up quickly enough after dialing 911. The police have to investigate any call made to 911 even if no one speaks. Besides, I have no idea how long it took me to hang up--if the 911 operator heard all the screaming in the background she may have thought we needed police and not an ambulance.

So, we finally made it to the children's hospital and things moved quickly from there. I love that hospital. They are always so efficient and wonderful with children!

Here's the cut right after being anesthetized.

Here's where Paige seriously impressed me! She laid there without a single wimper or whine the entire time the Dr worked on her cut. They had to put 3 dissolvable stitches on the inside of the cut because the skin was open all the way down to the muscle. The dissolvable stitches held together the inner layer. Then she got several stitches on the outside, but I don't know how many--maybe 6 or so. She just laid there and watched Spongebob the whole time.