In case your kid should lose their balance on your bed, fall down and crack their head on the headboard of your bed you should know that head wounds bleed a lot.
We witnessed this point again Saturday morning. I was in the bathroom. The Girl, Boy and Mom, were all on our bed chatting and generally waking up. Suddenly I heard this awful crunch, followed by screams for The Girl, and a panic call for me from Mom. I ran out of the bathroom only to be met by a trembling Mom and even more trembling Girl in her arms, crying hysterically, blood gushing down the side of her head.
There is nothing that makes the bottom of your stomach drop to your feet like the site of your kid in pain and bleeding.
Mom hands The Girl to me. Into the bathroom we go and begin administering first aid. The gash just above her right eyebrow is nasty. The Girl is trembling, sobbing and crying as we begin to clean out the wound. I’m talking calm, quiet and doing my best to calm her down while getting a handle on the situation. I’m trying to be as matter of fact about the whole thing, knowing that my reaction fuels her reaction.
Here we are, in full blown crisis when suddenly, through her sobbing and crying she says, ‘I love you, Daddy.” It was the last thing I expected to hear from her at that moment and it struck me so hard that I had to take a second to pull it together before getting back to the task at hand.
I give her a cold cloth to hold over the cut while I start cleaning her up. She asks if she needs a bandaid and I said yes. She loses it again and start winding up. The Girl has had a thing about bandaids for awhile now. She had one that was an old school fabric one that got stuck on her skin a year or so ago. It hurt to get pulled off, and she’s been anti-bandaid ever since.
Mom thinks we need stitches. We have a brief conversation about how head wounds typically look worse than they are, and that the bleeding seems to be getting under control. But the cut is wide and nasty. So, because we can’t use a bandaid, I get some gauze (which is okay with The Girl) and a tensor bandage and wrap her head like a mummy. She thinks this is funny and laughs thru her sobbing.
However, the tensor keeps slipping. We need to get a bandage on her. She gets extremely upset when we mention bandage until my wife hits upon the idea to have her uncle and aunt put one on. They are nurses and seem to have some cred with The Girl and she agrees. So we call up my brother-in-law and his wife and ask if we can bring The Girl over and see if they can help out. They say of course (family is a wonderful thing) and The Girl and I hop into the car and drive across town to their house.
We get there and my brother-in-law meets us at the door with his stethoscope, hospital emergency room ID and other assorted medical paraphernalia and starts his work on The Girl. A few minutes later, the wound is closed, bandage is applied and everyones blood pressure begins to come back down to normal levels.
This is the third head wound for The Girl in the past year and a half, all just above the eye and all have been nasty bleeders. So, if you take anything from my adventure it’s this. Head wounds bleed…a lot. And, while this one was bad enough that we should have probably gone to the hospital for stitches, it looked a heck of a lot worse than it actually was.
