Sunday afternoon in the Emergency Room

On Saturday, late afternoon, I knocked on Scotty's door to see how he and Trevor were doing and was told that they were bored, bored, bored. "There's nothing to do!" they told me while hanging upside down off of Scott's bed and his computer chair...both of them making quite the picture of two children who have used up all of their creative powers and were plum out of ideas about how to entertain themselves. My answer to this? "Okay. Let's go to the park." This was received quite well, and once Trevor had checked in with his parents and we got Mylee ready to go, we headed out to North Cary Park, the playground and its cool climbing rock.

For about 45 minutes, all three of the kids ran around playing on the swings, sliding on the slides and climbing all over the rock. Neither Mylee nor Scott could get up onto the rock on their own the last time we were there. Trevor, (who is a lot smaller than either one of our kids, but incredibly strong) pulled both of them up their first go around, and after that, they were up and down a hundred times on their own. Here are a couple of pictures of the climbing rock that were taken last spring. (No...I didn't bring my camera to the park. Shocked? Yeah...well...it's been a crazy week.)

Trevor's over on the right on top. Notice where Maya's standing. Keep that spot of the rock above her in your head. It's very important in understanding what took place here on Saturday.

Scott and Trevor on the top.

Maya weighs twice was Trevor does...but he's a mighty little guy.

So, the kids had been playing for a while and I was sitting and watching them. They were having a great time. Scott was perched on that part of the rock in that first picture. It's about 6 feet from the ground. The kids had been climbing down only to go back up again, but Scott decided that he was going to jump down...and that's what he did. He came down in a crouch on both feet, but immediately rolled to his left...and I knew right away that something was wrong.

His ankle looked normal...there was nothing that screamed out to me, "BROKEN!!!", but he was clearly in pain. He stayed there for a bit, fighting off tears and trying to take some deep breaths. Sometimes when you get hurt, the worst of it passes after a minute or two and you can shake it off. I was hoping that's what would happen for Scott, but when we got him up, he couldn't put any weight on his left foot. I'd like to say that I just swept him up into my arms and ran him to the car...but Scott's a big kid and I haven't done any sweeping with him in quite some time. After a few minutes, Maya had helped me get him up onto my back and I piggy backed him to the Audi. I even got the three of them Frosty's from Wendy's on the way home thinking some ice cream would help heal him up. The treats might have been tasty, but it did nothing to help Scotty's ankle.

I decided to wait and give it overnight before rushing him to the hospital. We iced it right away and, while it looked a bit swollen, it wasn't obvious that there was a serious injury. I gave him some Advil and he slept soundly that night. 

When he woke up on Sunday, though, the swelling had moved to his toes and there was a bit of discoloration on the top of his foot.

He seemed content to hang out on the couch and he couldn't put any weight on his foot. He did this creative one legged crab walk, scooting on his rear end to get to and from the bathroom and when I touched his foot, he'd wince. While on the phone with Steven, the two of us decided it couldn't wait until the pediatrician's office opened on Monday morning, and at about 1:30 Sunday afternoon, Maya and I got Scotty into the car and took him to the Wake Med ER.

We were in the waiting room for a very long time but finally, we got in to get some x-rays and see a doctor.

We were told that the doctor couldn't actually see a fracture on the x-ray, but after she examined him, she said that she thought he might have a fracture in one of his growth plates which wouldn't actually show up on an x-ray. When they brought him in, he had a fever of about 99. She said that was also an indication that there might be a fracture. Apparently when a bone breaks, the body reacts to it like it would an infection. The body temp rises in an attempt to fix what is wrong. She was also worried about the fact that Scott couldn't put any weight on his foot and chose to put him in a half cast to immobilize his ankle.

Scott laid on his tummy with his leg up in the air, bent at the knee while they wrapped him up in a thick layer of cotton. Then the got a strip of plaster, wet it down and put it from his toes, against the bottom of his foot and up his calf to his knee. Over that they wrapped two ACE bandages. They molded the drying plaster to his foot and leg before letting him roll back over onto his back.

You can tell by the look on his face that he was incredibly happy about all of this. The tech who put on the cast also gave Scotty a quick lesson on how to use his crutches.

He doesn't really like walking with them so much, but thinks they make awesome machine guns.

He got a little emotional when it came time for bed. It's been a crazy week. He's hurt and he misses his dad. He's bummed about the possibility of having to quit his bowling league two weeks before it actually ends, the fact that he might miss a birthday party this coming Saturday, he's not sure when he'll get back in the pool again...and he misses his dad. I set him up with Robots in his room on the portable DVD player and got him as comfortable as I could. He fell asleep pretty quickly and slept through the night.

We have an appointment on Tuesday with an orthopedic surgeon who will x-ray his ankle again. We'll figure out what he thinks we should do and get Scotty back on the road to recovery. I'll be sure to post again once the final verdict is in. Until then, I'm going to try to help Scott master this whole walking with crutches thing. We'll let you know how it goes.