Thursday, May 7, 2009

I Expected Injuries.....but this?

This breaches the creativity threshold for injuries, even with 4 young boys.  


I'm going to warn you now that this made my stomach turn last night.  

And now you've been warned.  But the pictures are at the end (and not too bad) just to give you another chance.

We headed back to the Instacare last night.  Yet again.  Although at least this time it wasn't for  obviously needed stitches, more for the possibility and the sheer lack of knowing what to do about this one on my part.  Quite frankly, I was dumbfounded.   What does one do for a serious nose laceration?  

Let's back up a moment and set the stage, shall we?  

It's growing late in the afternoon.  Charlotte and Lincoln are napping, Alaina, Jacob and Dallin are playing in the back yard, Malia has just arrived home from school and I'm in the office with Taylor battling long division again.  Apparently the light bulb that went off above his head the day before suddenly making the whole process so easy and understandable has quickly burned out.  Thus we were pretty involved.  Again.   Aaron is on his way home from work.  

As we're battling the evil that is long division I hear crying, whining and screaming from the backyard.  Great.  Dallin tends to be a whiny kid, so I headed outside to tell him to knock it off yet again.  On my way out Alaina flies past me on her way into the house as she heads for the linen closet.  As she runs by me I ask her what is wrong this time.  She says "don't worry mom!  He's justified in crying this time because he just cut his nose with the scissors!"

Excuse me?  

My sauntering turns into sprinting as Dallin heads in to find me, blood pouring from his nose.  After getting him to the bathroom and starting the clean up process I begin my attempts at getting an explanation from someone.  
And I try to figure out just what is bleeding and how badly.

I do some considerable mopping up of his face and see where the lines are.  I notice a deep scratch on the side of his nose.  It's just barely bleeding though so I can't tell if it's fresh, and I try to think back to the past few days and whether or not he's had a scratch there already that may have scabbed over (and has now had the scab removed).  That leaves my mind though as I realize he has a decent cut at the bottom of his nose.  

And then I realized that I need to find out just how decent of a cut this is.  So I suck it up and push the tip of his nose upward.  Then I find myself grateful for adrenaline because if it wasn't pumping through me I probably would have thrown up on my son.  While it wasn't irreversibly deep, and thankfully he didn't cut all the way through his septum, the thought of how it happened, combined with the sight and feel of what I was doing kind of hit me.

I still can't quite figure out what exactly was going on, but Alaina had scissors outside so she could cut the string that she was using to make a leash for a stuffed animal.  Dallin picked up the scissors and somehow caught his nose in them.  Imagine opening a pair of scissors, pointing them upward and putting your nose right down in the center of the scissors.  Then closing them.  Yah.  Try explaining that to the Dr. 

So what exactly does that look like?  

This:  



(you can see the cuts on the outside of his nose from where the scissors cut there as well)

Every time I looked at the kid last night my stomach did a little flip.  

Thankfully this did not require stitches, since it was in an awkward place, and with the natural shape of the face it was holding itself together pretty well.  The dr suggested just letting it be, but thankfully Aaron mentioned dermabond (over and over) and the dr finally got the hint.  A 4yr old needs all the help he can get to hold his nose together!  

I still have  hard time looking at his nose, but mostly because I know what happened.  Otherwise I guess it just looks like he was playing with a red pen or scratched himself pretty well.  

Is it bad that part of me wishes I would have taken a picture of what the whole thing looked like when I was pulling his nose apart?

6 comments:

Aaron said...

hrumph....


every time you don't listen....something bad happens.

-Dad

Unknown said...

OUCH!!!

Kelsey said...

holy *$#@&^*$!

That makes me vomit for reals. I never want to see that again. WTH. Do I really want boys?? Or scissors for that matter.

Hollie Wood said...

Is it bad that ALL of me wishes you got the open nose pictures as well? I'm a morbid gal, I know. Glad he's ok. The stories your kids will have to tell when they're older...

~LL~ said...

K.....I, for one, am totall glad that I didn't see the "gaping septum"

Glad he's OK....

need to go hide all of our scissors.

zoinatt said...

OUCH!! Glad he's okay but EWWW on wanting pics of the really bad parts.