Emercency Room Excitement

I feel like I passed through a rite of passage as a parent Tuesday, February 23 with Andrew's first trip to the emergency room. I'll be perfectly happy if that's the last such trip we have to endure. So, here's the story:

After dinner Andrew was playing around while I cleaned up in the kitchen. As he often does, Andrew fell down and started crying, although this time he was crying extra hard. I looked over and saw that he had been playing with the tubular vacuum cleaner attachment, so I figured he had fallen on it. Paul picked him up and found that his mouth was bleeding. Then we realized that his mouth was bleeding A LOT. Paul rushed him over to the kitchen sink and tried to hold him so the blood drained out of his mouth so he didn't choke on it while I called 911. While I was on the phone, Paul realized that we should just drive Andrew to the hospital ourselves, so I hung up and we rushed to the car. I held Andrew on my lap in the car on the way to the hospital. Thankfully, the bleeding slowed significantly on the way to the hospital.

First we went to Magee Women's Hospital because it's the closest emergency room. (By the way, that's the hospital where Andrew was born). The emergency room there proved fairly useless, but they were able to look into his throat and see that he had a laceration on his soft palate. They decided to transfer Andrew to the children's hospital via ambulance just in case his small airway swelled shut on the way to there. Once at the children's hospital they gave Andrew an IV so they could do a CT scan of the artery behind the laceration to make sure that was not damaged. They decided that the artery looked fine, which was really good since they said it could cause a stroke if it got damaged--yikes! An ear, nose, throat doctor looked at his throat and determined that they wouldn't operate on it. They also gave Andrew some antibiotics through his IV. Then they needed to make sure that Andrew would drink before they let him go home, or else they'd have to keep him overnight for IV fluids. We were able to get him to drink some, and decided it was good enough and that it would probably be best to just get him home and to bed hoping that he would be more willing to drink the next day. All in all it was about a six and a half-hour ordeal so we didn't get home until about 1:30 am. Andrew ate only liquids for the first day after, and gradually worked his way up to solid foods.

His throat has healed really well so far and he's back to his normal self. I am thankful for all the blessings we received during this experience, bad as it was. For instance, Paul and I were both home when it happened, making it way easier to get Andrew in the car and to the hospital. They didn't have to operate on Andrew. The unnecessary ambulance ride between hospitals was just that- unnecessary- because Andrew was just fine during the transfer. Andrew, amazingly, fell asleep during the CT scan so he was able to stay still for it. The injury wasn't any worse than it was. I had decided at the last minute to get the medical insurance plan with the $1500 deductible instead of the $2500 deductible (whew).