First Blood
Well last night I had my first experience of panic, chaos and fear as a father, related to the well being of my son. When ever Ethan and I come home together, it is a ritual. He lets Lacey out of her Kennel and runs to the back door to let them out and go with them. But it was warm and I wanted to be wearing shorts so I got him to follow me to the bathroom.As I was changing, Ethan found Jessica’s razor on the counter top. He quickly picked it up to show it to me as I ran to stop him. Unluckily, he pick it up with his thumb on the razor and it was new, so his smile of “Look dad, look what I got for you” turned intoa frown and scared look of “owww, what just happened” My heart sank. I panicked more than he did, which only frightened him more. I quickly put him in our bath tub with the water running, since Ethan LOVES water. If there is water running anywhere, he wants to put his hands in the stream, so i used that to my benefit. What made me panic so much, was the flow of blood. It wasn’t slowing down and I couldn’t get a bandaid on it. Darrell, a friend at work, explained that children bleed a lot due to the child’s blood ability to clot. I found this on the internet today:“Most wounds in healthy children bleed a lot because the vessels supplying blood flow to the area are very healthy…..Even wounds as small as 2 mm on the scalp can nearly cover a shirt with blood. ” source To make matters worse, I couldn’t get a cel phone signal, so I had to go grab the home phone. On the way to get the phone,I kicked the dog bowl over (Shattering it) since my dog had pushed it out into the middle of the kitchen. I called Jessica, who got me to calm down and scrub my plan to goto the ER. My fear was that if I cut my thumb with a razor, my thumb is pretty large, so the blade can only go so deep. Well, Ethan’s thumb is much smaller, so the ratio of depth is greater. I hate needles, knifes, and blood, so this only worsened the experience. Well, I got him cleaned up and wrapped his hand in a towel to apply pressure, which is really difficult to do with a 19 month old. Jessica gave me the idea to just watch some TV to get him to sit still, sowe went up stairs with a cup of milk, sat in the game room and watched Sagwa and named items in a learning book (Apple, Boat, Cat, Dog, Egg, Flowers, …) He looked pretty tired, so I picked him up and put him in his crib. I was so shaken by the whole experience that I just wanted to climb into his crib and hold him all night, but I think I am over the weight limit for that crib (or any crib for that matter). I kissed him goodnight, and turned off the light.
I watched him on the crib cam for about10 minutes before I switched over to the VMA’s which were horrible BTW. I could write about how bad they were, but anyone who watched, already knows. The only highlight of the show was the lighting production teams use of high powered video projection to create really interesting scenes. If it wasn’t for Tivo, the whole show would have been unbareable. I blooped through the commericals,intros, outtros, thank you speeches, and “the nominees are video montages”.
September 3rd, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Wow that would have been very scary. Good job on calming yourself down. (Or getting Jessica to.)
It’s crazy how it hurts the parents more when the child is the one in pain. Shows your love.