The Perils of Kickball

After a week with Zevi, I was really looking forward to a week with the kids in school.  So, of course, Camille didn't feel well on Monday and stayed home.  (She wasn't really sick.  But if they complain about anything I feel like I should probably keep them home.  It's very annoying.)  And then on Tuesday, around 1:30 I got a call from the school nurse at Monticello High School telling me that Bentley had fallen on his arm playing kickball.  I was going to just brush her off, but she went on to say that when he tried to walk to the nurse's station, he fainted.  Apparently as he was passing out, he tried to lean against a brick wall, only to slide down the wall with his face against like a cheese grater.  Not good.

I hurried to the school to pick him up, the nurse and PE teacher insisted on walking him out to my car in case he got woozy again.  And I was SHOCKED to see him.  He looked like this:

Yikes?!?!!?

I'd made an appointment with a pediatrician while I waited in the car for him, so we pretty much went straight there (I did leave a note for the little kids, who were due to get off the bus very soon).  She looked at his arm, put him in a sling, gave him a bunch of ibuprofen, and recommended I take him to the emergency room.  She said in growing children, you don't want to mess around with elbow joints, and that was the fastest way to get an orthopedic doctor to look at it.

I can admit this now without cursing my luck: I had never been to the ER before!!!  Going new places always gets me a bit anxious, and it's even harder if I know it will be difficult to park the van (like, say, in the UVA Hospital parking garage, where the ceiling is too low), so this was slightly terrifying to me, but there was nothing to it but to drive there and hope I could figure everything out.  We pulled into the ER entrance and they took Bentley and pointed me to where there was oversize vehicle parking in a different garage.  It was all easy peasy.  I quickly joined Bentley and we got him checked him.  Everything was fairly quick-- we got checked in, and then checked in again in the peds wing.  They put him in a room and had a doctor look at his arm.  They took x-rays.  The doctor came back and explained that she could see a tiny crack in his bone so we should have an orthopedist look at it and then... nothing.  We ended up waiting nearly two hours for the orthopedist to finally show up (and even after all that, we just got a resident).  So that was frustrating then, especially because Bentley was hungry and I didn't want him to pass out again!  (Also, everyone was very confused that we were there for a broken arm when his face was so obviously banged up.  I was sort of glad this had happened at school so I wasn't suspect or anything...)

The resident was very helpful, though.  He showed us the x-ray and explained that Bentley had a growth plate that was displaced, so he'd need a splint for now while it was swollen and then he proceeded to do just that. 

This is just an image I found on the internet, but 11B is pretty much exactly what Bentley's x-ray looked like: that tiny bump on the left side is slightly displaced and not right.

See how swollen it is underneath?

By the time we finally left, we'd been there for 4 hours.  Ugh.  Let's not do that again, okay?  Bentley was starving so we hit Five Guys on our way home.

We went back a week later and a doctor (a legit doctor this time!) put a real cast on it.  She said he'll only have to wear it for two more weeks, so that's not bad.  It's driving Bentley crazy, since he can't bend his arm at all now (watching him try to scratch his head or move his hair off his forehead is hilarious), but honestly, it could have been so much worse.

Getting casted up.  We weren't sure what they would do, but once I realized we were sitting waiting in the Casting Room I figure it out.  (I should have been a doctor!)

At least he got a much more comfortable sling!

But the best part was on Friday when Bentley passed the test to get his learner's permit (!!!) and his face is all beat up for his picture!  What are the odds of those two things happening the same week???

Anyway, in another moment of amazing irony, we realized that Bentley will get his cast off the same day he gets his braces off, so we'll probably shell out the $3 to get him a new picture on his permit after that!

He can still enjoy pizza!

Anyway, it's been an exciting week.  Just think-- we've never broken a bone in this family until this year, when we've had both Ryder and Bentley break stuff!  It's nuts.  But we're lucky, they've both been pretty no big deal breaks.  They both definitely could have been much worse!