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Last Wednesday afternoon, just before naptime. “Mama, Ervin fell down.” He starts to cry. I scoop him up and immediately see a purple circle on his forehead where it appears that his skin has opened. But it’s not bleeding, yet.

I take him to the bathroom and run some warm water for a washcloth, then try to dab the circle, which has now turned bright red but still isn’t really bleeding. He won’t let me touch it, but he’s stopped crying.

The more I look at the spot, the more I see under the skin, and I start to get more nervous. I call my dad, who has almost finished cooking his lunch, and ask him to come over. He does, a few minutes later. He takes the boy, sits down, and looks at it, too.

He’s not sure if his littlest grandson will need stitches, but he suggests I take him to the ER where they can at least clean up the wound. Then he takes big sister and they walk to his house, while I take the boy and buckle him into the car armed with his favorite blanket, the washcloth, and a toy.

I drive less than 10 minutes to the closest small town, where there’s a small brick building. I push the intercom button outside the Emergeny Entrance door and say “My two year old split his forehead open and I don’t know if he needs stitches.” A familiar face opens the door and I walk into the first room on the left, holding my boy.

An older nurse with a kind face walks in, coos at my boy, and says “did you pop your forehead?” She then busies herself trying to take the blood pressure around his tiny little arm and dabbing the now slowly bleeding circle with gauze and warm water. He won’t really let her do it, either, but he stays happy and calm as can be. There are distractions, like the emergency response poster on the wall and the fun dangly things on the blood pressure machine.

The doctor comes in a few minutes later, talks to Erv a little bit, and gets to work dabbing numbing gel on the spot and wrapping his head, all the while talking about getting the wound dry and hoping to glue it together. He then tells me that the bandage needs to stay on my two year old’s head for 20 minutes (TWENTY MINUTES!). Miraculously, though, he doesn’t immediately rip it off, and we manage to kill that time singing songs and playing with various equipment in the room while he sits on my lap.

When the 20 minutes is finally up, the doctor comes back in, takes the bandage off, and looks at it again. He talks more about the glue and needing to dry out the opening for it to work, while covering the spot with some kind of cotton ball and telling me to hold it there for five minutes. FIVE minutes. Erv wasn’t thrilled with that, at all, but I held my ground and his little head, and we get through it. When the time is up, the nurse holds his head while I hold his arms, and the doctor dabs the glue on his forehead. It doesn’t work. Stitches it is.

After being in that room for more than 30 minutes, I finally start to feel completely helpless as they swaddle my toddler and lay him down on the bed. The nurse sits by him and says, over and over “he’s not fighting me too much, just kicking his feet.” But he’s crying, and he’s scared as the doctor leans over him with the needle and thread, and sews his forehead back up with three black stitches.

By the time he’s done, my littlest boy is sweaty and worn out from crying. I scoop him up and unwrap the sucker that another nurse had just brought in for him.

We get some final instructions to come back in seven days, watch for a concussion, and offer up pain medicine every 3-4 hours if it’s needed, and then make a visit to the admissions office down the hall, pay our co-pay, and walk back out into the sunshine. A nurse gives us two more suckers, and I unwrap one for each of us after I’ve semi-successfully cleaned up the mess from the first sucker and buckled my little scrapper back into his car seat.

The next day (and the next five days), he doesn’t flinch as I put Neosporin and a new Band-Aid on, and I try not to think about the fact that I wasn’t watching my littlest two while they jumped on bubble wrap in the living room. Am I a bad mom because I didn’t see him slip and hit his head on the floor? What do other people think of me when they see his head and asked me what happened? I don’t know. But I do know that we’re going back to the clinic tomorrow to get those three stitches out, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I don’t have to take my little daredevil back there anytime soon.

One visit to the ER in seven and a half years of being a parent is PLENTY.

Have you made ER visits with any of your kids?
 

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