Deja Vu All Over Again

363 days before this story took place, my daughter jumped off a four foot high platform while yelling “To infinity and beyond!”. The result of this stunt was a broken leg. She started kindergarten with a pink full leg cast and a wheelchair.
Saturday August 16, 2008, was my wife’s father’s mother’s family reunion for their side of the family. The event was held way out in the middle of no where at a small “resort” with a fishing pond, a large meeting building, camping, swimming and a play ground. Both the wife and I had to work on Saturday. The plan was for the grandparents to take our two daughters to the reunion and I would pick them up on my way home after I got off work at 3pm.
3 o’clock rolls around and I’m out the door. I’m about 10 miles down the highway and I see I have a few messages on my cell phone. My father-in-law had called and said that the girls wanted to swim and that they wanted me to bring their bathing suits. I could have gone by the house to get the bathing suits but the life jackets (must have) were in the trunk of their mother’s car. I wasn’t going to back track to the hospital downtown.
An hour later, after stopping for a bottle of water at a gas station, I finally made it to the reunion. The weather was unseasonably pleasant. It was a breezy 80 degrees and over cast. It felt like October instead of August. I spotted my mother-in-law sitting at a picnic table under a large oak tree next to the playground. She was watching my 3 yr. old play on the swing set. I noticed my 6 year old daughter was down by the pond fishing with several teenage boys.
My 3 year old saw me and came over. I gave her a hug and she told me she didn’t want to leave. At about the same time, the 6 yr old saw me and came running up the picnic table. First thing she asked was, “Did you bring my bathing suit.” My “no” was quickly followed with crying and a mini-tantrum. Kids laughing and splashing in the swimming pool were the background noise to this little exchange and her displeasure was certainly understandable. I told her she could fish for another 20 minutes but then it would be time to leave. The 3 yr old and the 6 yr old scattered.
20 minutes turned into an hour. I sat and talked to both my father and mother in-law as we watched the kids play. The 6 year old caught a big turtle. It was a 18 inches long and one of the boys had to reel it in. Later she caught another fish that was of respectable size. I joked that she “was the best hooker at the family reunion”.
It was now 5 o’clock and I wanted to kick off my shoes, take a shower and settle in for the Cowboy’s preseason game against Denver. I insisted that we were now leaving and started to the car carrying the 3 yr. old. The 6 yr. old stayed behind and was playing with a bear carved with a chainsaw out of a tree stump. The grandparents were watching her and laughing. I had just got to the car and I turned and yelled, “It’s time to go. Come on!”
She was about 20 yards away from the car when she said goodbye to her grandparents and started to run towards me. I was starting to load the 3 year old in the car and stopped to look up just in time to see it. There was a pink volleyball net between the cars and the picnic tables. As I passed it, I remembered looking down at the tie-downs and thinking, “That is dangerous, why would they put that there?” I soon found out that my judgment was correct. It was dangerous.
The 6 yr. old didn’t see the tie-down ropes and ran right into them. She tripped and went face first into the ground. Her arm must have tried to break the fall and she landed flat and limp in the dirt. She screamed instantly as she jumped up. She was covered in grass and dirt and was holding her arm. I froze for a few seconds because I couldn’t leave the 3 year old standing in the parking lot and I had to get over to the 6 yr. old. Finally, I snapped out of it and carried the 3 yr. old with me. I met the grandparents halfway and we huddled around the 6 yr. old. She was screaming “I broke my arm” and other related phrases.
I looked at it and could tell right away that something wasn’t right. It looked bent and sort of dented. I immediately took her with my arm around her shoulder and walked to the car. My father-in-law said, “Are you going to _____________(local hospital)?” “No”, I said, “I’m taking her to __________ (children’s hospital)”. He said, “we will take ___________(3 yr old) with us, you go on.”
I loaded up my daughter in the front seat and off we went. She was stoic and I was wondering if her arm was actually broken. Maybe it was just a bad sprain and looked bent and dented because of the angle of the sunlight. Maybe not. We stopped in the first town we drove through. I used a stuffed purple unicorn and whatever junk I could find in my back seat to prop up and stabilize her arm. It wasn’t perfect but it was the best I could do. She was quiet and said she didn’t feel like talking. If you know my daughter, you would recognize this as something wrong.
I called her mother from the car. She was still at work and was going to leave when we were ten minutes from the hospital. I drove the 40 miles to the hospital as quickly and bump-less as I could. I pulled up in the emergency room entrance and ran around to the passenger side of the car. I got her out slowly and walked her in through the automatic doors. In the waiting room, there is a podium with an employee standing there. The waiting room and podium combination could easily pass for an auction house or an AA meeting.
I spoke to the person standing behind the podium and said, “My daughter has a possible broken arm.” Two female nurses came out from behind the counter and took my daughter to the back. They stopped me at the counter and said, “Sir, we just need you to fill this out first.” I quickly jotted down answers to the dozen or so questions.. They then asked me the same questions as I was filling out the form. I hesitated on “birthday” because our anniversary is on the 7th and my daughter’s is on the 8th. Every time I have to remember her birth date I have to remember the wife and I eating a hamburger at Brahms’s for our anniversary because she was big and pregnant and we were being induced the next day. Otherwise, I always want to answer “the 7th”. Then I completely blanked on her pediatrician’s name. I know the name but for the life of me I couldn’t think of it.
All the while I thought, “This is a huge waste of time and my daughter is probably scared to death back there.” When they asked me the last question I realized the purpose of this exchange. They said, “and how did this happen?” “Oh, I get it”, I thought. They wanted to separate us to make sure I’m not the reason for the broken arm. “Good for them,” I thought, “what a clever way to detect child abuse”.
The nurses had my daughter sitting in a chair when I got back to the triage room. They asked if she had any allergies and then gave her some pain medication and put her arm in a splint. Just then, her mother arrived. We were then moved to another room and my daughter was put in a bed. The room had a small hard chair, a mesh chair, some cabinets, a machine to take vital signs, some oxygen equipment and a small 13 inch color TV. We turned the channel to Nickelodeon and watched Sponge Bob Square Pants.
About 20 minutes later we were taken to the X-ray room. They took the X-rays and I peaked around the corner at the monitor. From a distance of 10 feet, it looked as if there was a break in the ulna. I asked the technician if it was broken and he either ignored me or didn’t hear. I took it as a hint and didn’t ask again. We then rolled back to the room. We were both wearing our hospital scrubs and the X-ray tech asked were we worked. My wife said, “I work at X and John works at Y”. Before she could finish her explanation my daughter pipes up and says, “But sometimes mommy works at Y with daddy.” We laughed and I thought, “That’s right lady, my wife is doing double duty….for 4 more months”.

We got back to the room and waited another 20 minutes. It was hot and I fanned myself with a “Clifford the Big Red Dog” book. My daughter wasn’t comfortable either. She wanted to sit in a chair. We moved the pillows from the bed to the chair and propped her up. I stood as the wife read her the aforementioned Clifford book. After finishing the book, my wife said, “Why don’t we get you back up on the stretcher?” My daughter took “stretcher” to mean the mesh chair. She said, “Yeah, I want in the stretcher”. We had to explain what the word meant and finally got her back in the bed. I thought, “What a horrible name for a piece of equipment. The word ‘stretcher’ sounds like a torture device”.
When the Doctor came, my wife went with him to look at the X-ray on a computer screen. I stayed with my daughter and then when my wife came back we both went around the corner to look at the monitor. Yep, it was broken alright. My wife told me out in the hallway that the doctor said that they would need to do surgery. Worst case scenario would be an open reduction procedure and the best case scenario would be a closed reduction. Bottom line was that she would need to be under anesthesia. We went back to the room and a male nurse came in to start the IV. After about 10 minutes of explanations and manipulation of the equipment by my daughter, she finally agreed to let him do it. He did it quickly and for some odd reason she smiled throughout the procedure. I was proud of her because she was trying so hard to be brave despite her fear and pain.
It was now 10 pm and a orthopedic surgical resident came into the room. He introduced himself and explained the procedure. He explained all the possible scenarios for surgery and we signed the consent forms. I didn’t want to offend the guy but I asked two questions. My first question was, “Are you going to be doing this procedure?” To which he answered, “No, I will be in the room but Dr. Smith will be performing the operation.” Then I asked, “If you have to make an incision, will you be closing with staples or stitches?” He answered that they don’t use staples in pediatrics and that they would be using stitches. We thanked him for his time and he left.
30 minutes later we were wheeled up to the surgery waiting area. The doctor and the anesthesiologist came in to talk to us. The doctor looked exactly like Liev Schreiber from the 2008 season of CSI: Vegas. He was a nice guy and had a great bed side manner. He said that the ulna was broken and that the head of the radius had come dislocated from the elbow joint. He said that he could simply do a closed reduction but that it most probably would not hold. He told us that he was going to make a small incision on her elbow and run a long screw through her arm to stabilize the bones as it healed. He would put a fiberglass long arm split cast that could be adjusted after the procedure to accommodate any swelling. In six months, we would have to come back to have the screw removed.
They offered a selection of colors for her cast. With her leg, she got a pink cast and with her arm she went with red. Then, they offered her a flavor of oxygen. She chose banana. They pushed some pain medication through her IV and we were escorted out of the room. Before we left, we both kissed her head and told her we loved her. We went to the surgery waiting room and sat on the couches. We both planned for me to go home and get some clothes and toiletries as soon as the doctor came out and told us everything was OK. After about an hour and 15 minutes he stuck his head in the door of the waiting room and walked over to us. He sat down and explained that everything went well and that he would see us tomorrow.
I followed him out of the room and walked down to the parking garage. I got home and FINALLY got my shoes off. What a relief. I took a quick shower, brushed my teeth, and threw on some shorts, shirt and flip-flops. I got two empty bags and filled them both to the top. I grabbed way too much stuff but I figured better safe than sorry. I jumped back in the car and drove the 20 miles back to the hospital.
I came to a security checkpoint and there was a guard standing behind a podium in the only open hallway on the bottom floor. Apparently, they don’t want people walking in and out of a children’s hospital in the middle of the night. “Good for them”, I thought again. After some explanations at the security checkpoint he looked up my daughter’s room number and sent me upstairs. I got to the room and it felt like it was 90 degrees in there. The first thing I did after kissing my wife and daughter was find the thermostat and turn it down to 60. My daughter said the last thing she remembered was kissing us and she didn’t remember us leaving the room.
There was a bed for the parents in the room and a recliner. My wife took the recliner only under the condition that I would agree to switch halfway through the night. I agreed and was fast asleep. An hour and a half later I was woken up and given the opportunity to go home. Apparently, my snoring was keeping my two female roommates awake, was unwanted and embarrassing. I decided to stay and traded spots with my wife. They weren’t lying about the “keeping us awake” part because ten minutes later, they were both asleep. I sat in the recliner and watched the news coverage of Obama and McCain at Rick Warren’s church in California. At about 5 am, I couldn’t hold my eyes open and drifted off to sleep.
We all woke up at about 9AM. Her food tray was on the bedside table, untouched and cold. She picked at the food and didn’t really have much of an appetite. I ran downstairs to the cafeteria and got breakfast for the wife and I. We ate breakfast and laid around the room. The wife took our daughter downstairs for a puppet show in the main atrium. They also had set up toy trains and were letting the kids play with them. I slept the whole time they were gone.
The doctor came in about 1PM. He asked our daughter if she could move her thumb while he wiggled his own thumb as a demonstration. She picked up her none broken arm and wiggled it. He laughed, and said, “I get that 9/10 times”. He told us he would need to meet with us at his office in about a week to see the progress of the arm. He released us from the hospital, the nurse discontinued the IV and we went home.