Thursday afternoon Isaac dropped a shovel, blade down, on his toe. I suppose there's never a good time to do something like that, but the afternoon before a predawn flight to New York, now that would be a bad time.
Earlier that day I was just leaving Isaac's hair cutting place, where he had been trimmed into wonderful shape (striking a balance between Ben's aesthetic, AKA "Eisenhower" and mine, which he coldly terms "Leif Garrett.") when my friend Martha called. She had a small personal crisis in that her husband was in the emergency room with causes that were unclear (turned out to just be flu-related dehydration). I offered to watch Noeli while she sorted that out and we rendezvoused at my house. During a very brief interlude, Isaac and Noeli out by themselves working in the yard. (It was almost fifty degrees after all.) I was upstairs, planning to make Isaac's bed while parking the baby nearby and watching the children through the window. However when I looked out, what I saw alarmed me. In ten short minutes they had both removed their shirts and reverted to a feral state. They had discovered a problem– that the car wasn't dirty enough to need washing and they wanted to wash it. And a solution– they had made a wheelbarrow full of mud and were launching it at the car with Isaac's catapult.
What creative children!
It really was working, too, as the front end of the car was already quite filthy, covered with large splats and the windshield running with grit.
I leaned out the window to register my, um, disapproval of this project. Isaac was saying, "But MOM…!" and then he dropped the shovel and began to scream. I rushed downstairs with baby on my hip and somehow carried Isaac in to the kitchen. He was really screaming full tilt and the toenail was filling with blood immediately. The impact was right at the base of his big toenail on his left foot. I got an ice pack and gave him a big glug of children's Motrin, carted him upstairs to see if watching the Muppet Show would help. He screamed and screamed and screamed. Meanwhile, there was still Noeli and the baby to tend to also. But I got the baby to ride in his swing and managed to occupy Noeli with the project of chewing her way through an entire pack of gum. Isaac screamed on and on, while I variously hugged him, read first aid on the internet, spoke to the nurse on call, adjusted his ice pack, explained the situation to Ben who was en route home in the car, got a pillow to elevate it, etc., etc., etc. Multitasking at its finest.
The fact that he and Ben were scheduled to leave for New York well before sunrise was adding a layer of urgency to the project. the nurse on call said that I really should bring him in, and suggested the new pediatric ER– for kids only. I covered the toe in baby oragel– this topical novocaine type stuff for teething babies. That seemed to work. Martha picked up Noeli and Isaac drifted off to an exhausted and sweaty sleep.
As the evening wore on, Ben and I tried to wake him to see whether he could walk on it or not. We needed to decide whether to take him to the ER or whether he could go to New York, or what. For me, too, the stake were high. A three day weekend as a single parent of two, followed by two more days as Ben has a business trip also, looked a lot less attractive than a three-day weekend sorting and packing with just the baby to care for. Finally around 9:00 at night it was obvious that the toe was cripplingly painful and the trip was highly at risk. It seemed that the best hope for Isaac to still go to New York would be to take him to the ER and see if they could help him. I packed a bag with snacks and books and prepared to be there for hours.
But amazingly, the children's ER was (at least that night) a wonderful experience! They got us in right away and more importantly they were actually able to fix the toe quite a bit! What the doctor did was bring in this little gadget, like a filament of metal at the end of a fat plastic handle. He told Isaac to look away (never a good sign) and didn't seem to have any local anesthetic on hand. This worried me, but I didn't want to raise the concern in front of Isaac. I just held him on my lap and covered his eyes. The doctor zapped a hole into the toenail itself, the room filled with the smell of burning hair, and blood began to gush out like crazy. It soaked through a couple iterations of gauze and then doctor got me to hold it and said that in a few minutes it would feel a lot better. It kept bleeding prolifically, but Isaac calmed down. I read him his arachnid book while holding the gauze on there and he was fine as long as he didn't actually see the florid bloody mess.
After a while, they came to x-ray it, which Isaac hated and cried all the way through. Turns out it did have a small fracture from the impact. A nurse came and bandaged up the whole mess. The doctor came back and said that this sort of thing can turn into a nasty infection, and with the fracture under it the infection can go into the bone, too, so he was prescribing an antibiotic to fend that off. Also strong pain medication because it was likely to throb at night and keep him awake. But as for New York, he said, "Oh, sure, he can go. Now that the blood is drained off it will feel a lot better."
Recently, since Uncle Will's death, Isaac has decided to add "Uncle Will" to his name. He has repeatedly mentioned that his new name is Isaac Uncle Will Jonathan [Blank]. So when the insurance lady came in and asked him his name, he first spelled Isaac and then said his middle name was Uncle Will. So I said, "Well, tell her your OTHER middle name too." And he said, "Jonathan…. my name is Isaac Uncle Will Jonathan [Blank]." She looked at me questioningly. I explained, "Well his uncle Will died recently and he's decided to add 'Uncle Will' to his name. But his birth name is just Isaac Jonathan." She smiled wanly and went tappity tap on her keyboard.
A guy brought Isaac out to the car in a wheelchair. As we drove away, Isaac observed, "I liked that doctor. He was very well trained."
We had to stop on the way home to get his prescriptions and all told it was about midnight when we got home. Isaac was very wound up by then and couldn't sleep until about 2 a.m. He and Ben had to get up at 4 a.m. to leave for their 6:15 a.m. flight (ugh). And in the meantime the power went out. So poor Ben had to get Isaac ready and sort out the details in the pitch dark. I was on two hours of sleep, too, tending the baby. Ben kept walking through the room carrying a lantern.
But they got off to NY without a hitch to attend a 50th wedding anniversary party for Ben's aunt and uncle. I'm home holding down the fort and trying to grapple with the reality of moving everything we own from this house to the new house and all that that entails.
Lena got into the act also. Not wanting to be outdone, she tore off HER toenail and made a bloody mess all over the place, needing first aid and a call to the vet. I really need at least a two-year nursing degree at this point.