grace's adventure...

Last week Grace and I got to do something that her brothers have not done so far.  We got to go visit our local Emergency Room.  I don't really have the specifics since I didn't see it but Grace hit her head on something and put a gash in her forehead.  In all likelihood it was the corner of our raised hearth because the cut turned out to be deep. 

I was in the kitchen cooking dinner and doing homework with John & Luke and, of course, Mark was at work. All of the sudden I heard a loud 'thwonk', dead silence and then a scream.  You know it's bad when there is silence before the scream.  It was difficult to clean the cut because Grace is so defensive about her face/head area and she had to have been in pain.  But once it was cleaned up, I didn't think she needed anything more than a band-aid.   It didn't really bleed that much and it seemed like a pretty small cut.  I talked to my friend Jocelyn, who is a pediatrician, and after talking to her decided to take Grace to the ER when Mark got home from work. 

Here is a picture of her cut at home and as you can see, if you look closely, it is pretty deep.

 I'm so glad I took her to the ER at our local children's hospital (this is where she has gotten a lot of her therapies, sees most of her specialists and has had all of her procedures, so they have all her information in their charts).  They were so great with my special little girl.  She was not happy being there and most everything scared her.  She is so strong and cried a lot.  It took 3 of us to hold her down just to get the topical numbing solution on her forehead.  I kept her in her stroller for most of the time because she was hysterically crying and fighting a lot of the time.

The ER doctor and I decided to give Grace versed, which is a medicine used to relax patients before medical procedures.  She has gotten this before and responds really quickly to it.  It makes her giggle and become very drowsy.  Below is a picture of her with versed on board and it gives you a better look at the cut, if you want one.  It was so nice to see her giggle after all the crying and fighting she had been doing.  (All these pictures are from my phone that is why they are such poor quality.)

Once she was sufficiently under the influence of versed and her forehead was numbed enough, the doctor and nurse put her in a full body papoose to hold Grace down during her procedure.  It was so sad to see her completely strapped down, she looked really scared.  She still tried to fight a little by moving her head away.  So we needed to hold her head still, but once she settled down she did really well with the stitches.  Grace ended up with 5 stitches. 

Thankfully, she seems to have forgotten her trauma and hasn't played with the steri-strips they put on top of her stitches.  They are dissolvable stitches so hopefully when I take the steri-strips off tomorrow or Friday, the stitches will be gone.  I'm not sure what we will be facing in terms of a scar but we are praying that any scar will fade with time.

So Grace wins the prize for being the first Isabella child to go to the ER and to get stitches.  I'm not sure what the prize is but she sure wins!