A Healthy Baby but an Injured Mary

We have a healthy baby in utero but Mary is injured for the fourth time in two weeks!

Today was a zany day. In the morning I went to a ladies' meeting and enjoyed the luxury of taking only Margaret, leaving the two bigger ones with Grampa. The meeting ran late and I got home to a degree of chaos because the glass stove top which I broke--thankyouverymuch--was being replaced.

Margaret "smiling" for the camera while being placed by Daddy in the empty socket of the stove

I was home a mere hour before going to my mid-pregnancy ultrasound appointment. My homebirth-friendly obstetrician is an hour's drive away, so I was gone more than three hours, leaving all three children with (extremely generous) Grampa Neil who babysat them.

Scanned ultrasound photo to come . . . but we do have one seemingly happy and healthy baby boy or girl in there! It was a real joy to see Baby squirming around!

I arrived home and within minutes heard screaming from the bonus room. The children were playing happily behind Grampa Neil sitting on the couch, so we have no eye witnesses for what happened next. Somehow Mary was standing on a chair which toppled over. Mary's screaming didn't stop, so I went upstairs to investigate and when she finally took her hands off her mouth, a whole mess of blood spilled out.

She had bitten through her bottom lip and we knew she'd probably need a stitch or two. Much screaming ensued as we loaded her in the car. I'm unaccustomed to being away from my children for so many hours in a day and my heart was really hurting at the thought of her going to Urgent Care with daddy instead of me, so I said I wanted to go. 

It was not the logical choice to send the pregnant lady who hadn't eaten in hours to Urgent Care (where she would go hours more without eating), leaving behind the one-year-old who really missed Mama, and putting the mother who is phobic of needles in the position of helping her daughter with stitches. Not logical, but hearts are foolish things!

Mary did very well at Urgent Care. ("Hey, I've been here before!") Of course, I was a little worried about Big Brother as I walked her in, her having been in for her hurt arm just two weeks ago and now showing up with a yellowing black eye and smashed up mouth. The doctor asked me about the black eye, which had a perfectly normal explanation, but I worried when later I heard her murmuring about it with another employee.

We did not use glue to close the cut because it was a jagged cut and the doctor said that the mouth area moves so much, it was highly likely Mary would just pop off the dried glue.

The doctor said that a shot of Lidocaine hurts very much so she wanted to try soaking the Lidocaine into the skin for 20 minutes. However, when it came time to clean Mary's wound, it was readily apparent that the Lidocaine had not soaked in to the right place and she had no anesthesia. The doctor told me that since we were doing one stitch, one stitch would hurt less than the shot of Lidocaine, so she advised us to proceed. I have zero experience with stitches so trusted her judgment (and her judgment may well have been correct).

Poor Mary had to endure having her arms strapped down behind her with the nurse pinning down her head and me pinning down her legs while the doctor placed the one stitch. It still takes about a whole minute to get a stitch in, tied, and clipped off! That minute felt long as Mary screamed and begged!

I am now in awe of my mother-friends who I know have had to accompany their children having much more serious, lengthy, and painful procedures. You know who you are. Now I can see that you are in a whole new club of amazing motherhood that I have barely glimpsed. I was positively traumatized by this One Stitch! I am such a softie, still uncalloused by having had very few of this kind of experience.

After I calmed a weeping Mary, got her her prizes from the doctor, and settled us into the car, she announced the need to go potty. We unbuckled, went back inside, and learned that all the restrooms in the Urgent Care had just broken! (A sewer issue?) So I drove Mary quickly over to Target to use the facilities and then buy us some food. It was a humbling moment for me to remember that when we see strangers in public, we do not know their stories. Here I was, having to take Mary into a brightly lit public store with her absolutely covered with blood. Faces bleed a lot. Our wall and floors have blood on them. Mary's hair was matted with blood. Her dress was poured down with blood to the skirt and it had soaked through the thick corduroy to soak her white blouse beneath! I was probably covered in blood too but my black blouse hid it. What people thought of me as mother of the bloody girl with a black eye, I certainly don't know, but I felt so self-conscious!

It is good that Mary's heart desire was for a nasty fake-o doughnut with white frosting and rainbow sprinkles because she did not know that I probably would have given her anything she asked for after the trauma of my pinning her down.

And now we wait to see the fate of one of Mary's teeth. At first we thought they were all okay, but I saw at Urgent Care that one of her teeth was bleeding all around the gum, so the doctor said that either her tooth will be just fine or it will die and turn grey, to be replaced in four years or so with a permanent tooth.

Do you think we can have some kind of padded Michelin Man suit built for Mary to keep her free of injuries for a while?