First Trip to ER

We had our first 'bloody' accident with Noah Monday night. It wasn't anything major, but it was the first semi-serious accident. He's had bumps and bruises and little scrapes here and there. We're not negligent or abusive parents; he's just an adventurous and active little boy. He's eight months and thinks he can take off walking.

Well, Monday night I was in the kitchen while Shannon was sitting on the floor in the bedroom playing with Noah. I heard a bump and Noah started screaming. Shannon yelled for me, and when I ran in there she was picking him up off the floor and his mouth was bleeding. He had been toddling around and tripped into the corner of the cedar chest. His mouth hit right on the corner.

We got the bleeding stopped with a paper towel and an ice cube. Once he calmed down and we could take a look at his mouth, we could tell he busted his lip. Really, his lip was ok, and if it had just been his lip, we wouldn't have done anything else. But we could see that when he fell, he cut his gum. It was a little gash across the top right side of his gum. It didn't look bad enough to need stitches, but I'm not a medical person. So we headed to the ER.

We got there about eight and ended up walking out at ten forty-five. Most of the time was sitting in the waiting room. Noah slept for a while, woke up for a while, cried some, slept some more, woke up and cried some more... He was definitely off his schedule and acting just as aggravated about being there as I was feeling. When someone finally did take a look at him we found out two things. One, it didn't need stitches, so they weren't going to do anything for the cut. Two, if there was any damage to the teeth, we'd have to wait for them to come in to be able to tell.

It was a little frustrating to sit there and wrestle with him in a crowded ER waiting room for so long for so little new input. But we wanted to make sure he was ok and to have somebody with a hospital name-tag say he's alright carries a little more weight than my guess.

I hope there aren't too many of these kinds of emergency trips, but I have that feeling this won't be our only one. This is one of those parts of parenting that hurts.

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