Major Medical

I've taken Quinlan to the emergency room so often that I requested a frequent visitor card--I thought that maybe after ten visits to the ER we could get a free x-ray or something. I don't think the nurse thought that was funny. But, seriously, when you are cleaning up head-to-toe road rash while you wait for a physician to read an x-ray, you need something to keep things on the light side.

The first time I took Quinlan to the hospital he was ten months old. His big brother, Evan, had pushed him, and Quin hit his head on a trunk in the living room. I saw the whole thing and the hit didn't seem too hard. So on the way to console Quinlan, I picked Evan up and put him in time-out. When I turned to Quinlan, he wasn't breathing and he passed out in my arms.

Terrified, I called 911 and they sent an ambulance to the apartment. By the time the emergency medical technicians arrived, Quinlan was sitting up, smiling, and clapping with glee. Despite Quinlan's quick recovery, I left Evan with a neighbor and rode with Quinlan in the ambulance to the emergency room. The doctor found nothing wrong with Quinlan and we went home puzzled, but happy that Quinlan was fine. Later his pediatrician suggested that Quin had simply held his breath until he passed out to get attention. How does a ten-month-old child even know to do that? The next couple of times he held his breath, I made sure that he wouldn't hurt himself on his way down (a ten-month-old can't get too hurt by plopping over) and left the room. The doctor said it was important for Quinlan to wake up alone so he could realize that passing out wasn't going to get him the attention he wanted. Again, a ten-month-old can realize this?

So we have established that the child was not opposed to over exaggeration. That is important for the next stories.

When Quinlan was three, he was pretending he was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (he had a favorite, but I can't remember which one--they all looked the same to me). He jumped from a swivel chair and hit hard on the wood floors at his Grandpa's house. It was a bit past his bedtime, so when he didn't stop crying we figured he was just tired.

So we drove home. We were surprised when he didn't fall asleep in the car on the way home (the boy, to this day, believes that sleeping in the car is ideal). We got him in his pajamas and put him in bed, but he was still whiny and wouldn't move his arm much. Now about two hours had gone by and I finally decided to call the on-call doctor. He thought it sounded like Quinlan had broken his arm and suggested that I take him to the emergency room.

Sure enough, he had a pucker fracture on his wrist.

His second broken arm was a trampoline injury. He wasn't jumping on the trampoline, he was trying to move it (I don't know why an ten-year old thinks he can move a trampoline by himself) when a couple of other kids jumped on the trampoline. I took him to the emergency room immediately with that one.

His third broken arm occurred as a result of a bicylce accident. I don't know the particulars. I didn't witness the tumble. At any rate, Quinlan didn't seem that hurt to me. But he kept complaining about his wrist. After about ten days of listening to him complain, I took him to the doctor, who found that Quin did, in fact have a broken arm. He was scheduled to get the cast off two days before a week-long river rafting trip with the Scouts. I moved the cast-removing doctor's visit to after the trip.

And so it was with that boy. Our last trip the hospital was just last summer when I got a phone call from one of his buddies at 10 o'clock at night informing me that Quinlan had taken a tumble on his long board (a skateboard that is built just to go fast down steep roads). When I got to the scene, I found Quin lying on a lawn riving in pain. He complained that he had broken his clavicle.

"How do you know that?" I am simply not easily convinced.

"I heard it," he grunted. Fine!