Jun
19

Concussed.

No day in which you have already been to the emergency room and back by eleven a.m. can be said to be a pleasant one, unless, I suppose, someone later appears on your doorstep with a gift-wrapped box of money, a plate of lobster ravioli in saffron cream sauce, and a magnum of fine champagne. Unfortunately for me, no such person has yet appeared, though I suppose there is still time.

Simone has gotten quite adept at getting down from beds and couches by turning around and lowering herself feet-first, and she was in the process of descending the couch around nine a.m. today when…I don’t know, exactly, but she landed on her head with such a forceful THWUHK! that my blood ran cold. Her blood, when I picked her up, ran right into my cleavage, as she did that terrible pause-before-the-scream-thing that babies do when wounded. Incidentally, the fall and the scream in these situations have a relationship similar but opposite to that between lighting and thunder. You know how the length of the pause between flash and boom indicates the distance of the lighting strike? Longer pause, less danger? Well inversely, after a fall, the longer the pause before the scream, the louder said scream will be, and the graver the injury. It’s science!

So, Simone screamed, I groped around to find the source of the blood, found a drop hanging from her nose and wiped it away, waited tensely to see if more would follow (No, thank heavens), hushed and rocked and swayed, and a minute or two later, it was all over. A red, slightly raised circle appeared high on her forehead. Simone rubbed her eyes several times, but her pupils were equal and reactive—I checked. I’ve seen Grey’s Anatomy.

I set her down and she resumed playing with a plastic cup and babbling sternly to herself, scooting along as if nothing had happened. I wondered if I should call the pediatrician, because of the THWUHK!, but this wasn’t exactly the first time Simone had smacked her head. The pediatrician had assured me that babies’ skulls are thicker in the front and back for precisely this reason, and Simone hit herself right where the forehead becomes the regular-old-head, nowhere near the temporal bone/epidural hematoma danger zone (I like to think of the middle meningeal artery as the highway to the danger zone—a little neurology humor, there!).

I just wrote an article about delayed-bleeding head injuries; I know what to look for, and Simone was fine. I twittered a hypothetical, and my instincts were confirmed.

After a little bit I picked her up and held her, and she fell asleep. Huh. Well, I told myself, she didn’t sleep much last night, because of Satan’s Kernels (what we call molars, in this house), so she’s probably tired. She’d already been up for three hours. Still, she didn’t usually fall asleep so easily! I pried open her eyelids to check her pupils again. {Ed. Note: The fact that she didn’t stir when I did this should have been my first clue that something was wrong}. Pupils looked good!

I didn’t feel comfortable putting her down to nap in the bedroom, so instead I spread a blanket on the floor and laid her on that. {Ed. Note: The fact that THIS didn’t wake her should have been clue number two}. I typed for a few minutes, and then gazed at Simone pensively. I dialed the pediatrician’s nurse triage line.
“This is probably silly…” I began.

The nurse seemed prepared to agree with me, but then asked whether the patient could be woken easily from her little cat nap. I scooped Simone up and sat her on my lap. She sort of flopped around, opened her eyes, then fell back asleep sitting up. Now, Simone DOES NOT go back to sleep once she has been woken, even if you stay very very still afterward, crouching outside the door, cursing the squeaky floorboards and hoping to god that she will. I jostled her. She opened her eyes part-way, then slumped back asleep, as if she were drugged. I said something to the nurse, who told us to go the ER, and after that everything happened so quickly that it wasn’t until I was offering Simone’s leg for a blood pressure cuff that I noticed she was barefoot.

I will draw a veil over what ensued. ER visits are unbearably tedious, and Simone was so obviously FINE once we were in an exam room (SHE IS ALWAYS FINE ONCE WE ARE IN AN EXAM ROOM). She most likely has a very mild concussion, and while her nose may possibly be broken, they don’t do anything for nasal breaks unless they are severe. Simone’s nose is almost back to normal, so all is well.

A few notes from the morning, however:

  • It wasn’t until the doctor asked whether her nose was always swollen, lumpy, and blue at the bridge, that I noticed anything was wrong with it at all. I would like to think this was because I was so intently focused on her head (looking at the lump, checking her pupils, feeling her soft spot for signs of increased intracranial pressure, like some sort of mad, groping phrenologist), but in truth the phone nurse asked whether her nose was swollen and I cheerfully assured her that it wasn’t. Maybe it got swelled on the way to the hospital?
  • In the course of two hours, Simone was called “Simon,” “SEEmone” “See-mon,” “Seemohn” (“Simone” pronounced with a fancy French accent), and, bafflingly, “Seymour.” No one called her by her actual given name without being corrected. I am used to this, but I still don’t get it. First, the French accent—why? Yes, the name “Simone” is French in origin. The name “Patrick” is Irish, and yet I would imagine that the little Patricks of the world are not perpetually addressed in a brogue, am I wrong? “Simon” I sort of get, because everyone thinks my poor baby is a boy (the attending, despite being told differently THREE TIMES, referred to my pink-shirted moppet as “he” throughout). Most common, though, is “See-mon,” which I just find bizarre, because who would give their child a name that sounds so much like “Semen?”
  • Simone’s blood pressure was terrifyingly high the first two times they took it, but the third time, it was normal. They assure me the first two readings are thus rendered meaningless, but this seems fishy to me, especially given Simone’s kidney issues. Is there some sort of blood pressure GPA system?
  • I am seriously considering investing in one of these.
By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |