So somehow we seemed to have missed documenting Harry's first trip to the ER for stitches to the noggin, from a few weeks ago.
The one day I was getting heat from someone in the office for having a cell phone in a meeting, it starts going off in my pocket. I tried to subtly look at who's calling, and see that it's Kim. Hoping it's nothing pressing, I hit the ignore button, and waited for everything to wrap up. On the way back to my office, I see she's left a voicemail (normal), and also that I've got a new email.
Voicemail:
(Harry screaming incoherently in the back for about 15 seconds)... "Call me back."
Then a quick check of email:
"Don't know how to text. At hospital. H. Hit head .he's awake.
Sent from my iPhone"
Are you kidding me... the one time I don't check. In Kim's defense, she very much knows how to text. She had just gotten a new phone that day, and hadn't quite figured everything out yet.
Quickly pack everything up and make the jog down the street to the parking garage, trying to text back at the same time, so she could just reply...
The comedy of errors begins (or continues, depending on your perspective)...
This "quick" trip over to the hospital immediately demonstrated how incredibly impossible it is to not get straight from one place to another around Alexandria. Zig zag doesn't do it justice... but I digress.
I fly into the ER parking lot, luckily getting a spot (oddly right next to Kim'car - we'll come back to that) and another jog into the building to find everyone.
"Hi I'm looking for my son, he came in a little while ago for stitches to the head?"
"Looks like they were discharged a while ago sir... they're gone"
"Um, no they're not, I just parked next to their car."
Phone rings, it's Kim. I ask, "where are you? They said you left?"
She apparently can't hear anything I'm saying into the phone, as the guy who sold it to her and nicely installed a scratch guard, forgot to take off the protective cellophane covering up the earpiece speaker, but is somehow responding to my questions.
"We're at the checkout counter, I can see you from here"
I immediately hang up and ask the other triage person where the checkout is... she very nicely (but ever so slowly) proceeds to walk me 3 feet to the left of the window to a sliding glass door, that they're immediately behind.
4 stitches right up the center of Harry's forehead, beginning just below the hairline.
So we're walking out, and Harry's giving me an overly detailed account of precisely what happened leading up to his topple, and accentuated the details as only a 7-year old boy can.
Sidenote: Not sure if everyone's aware of how much Harry hates when people say he's like Harry Potter, but he does. He really does. So you can imagine the look on his face when I said
"Wow, now everyone's
really going to be calling you Harry Pot.... "
Cue the emotion, all over again.
fortunately for us, the MedEvac helicopter was spinning up for takeoff on the pad between us and the parking lot. As perfect a distraction as you could ask for to diffuse the situation. It even gave us some fuel to get him to still go to the Cub Scouts pack meeting that night. A few helicopter questions that I couldn't answer, but I knew Conner's dad could... and he'd be at Cub Scouts, so we need to go tonight, so you can ask him. Phew. Made it out of that one.
So four days of delicately applying clean gauze dressings and copious amounts of Neosporin later, we returned to the ER to have the stitches removed. Needless to say, they remembered him, and he was in & out in like 5 minutes. Done and done.
Now, to address his new forehead scar and this whole Harry Potter thing. He's since decided that maybe it's not too scary for him to being reading, and he's been going at it to satisfy his nightly reading requirement almost every night since. At this point, he's on chapter 3, and isn't keen to put it down (no watching the movie until you finish the book).
