Our First Trip to Urgent Care

Today was such a long day.
We got up extra-early and got ready for church up in Pennsylvania today.  Our friends Adam and Jenn had a baby boy a few months ago, and today they blessed him, along with his new little cousin.  It was lovely to listen to it, and nice to be there for friends we met way back before we even had kids.  But between everyone taking turns waking up with various issues that needed to be resolved last night, the early morning, and a slightly unfamiliar routine, we were tired before Sacrament Meeting had even finished, and decided to go home early.

Jacob fell asleep on the way home.  Obviously he wasn't really ready to wake up at 7:30am today. Melinda whined about our choice of listening material (we turned on the General Conference podcast from April of this year).  Alex woke up when we got home, declaring his nap officially finished.  It was only 11am and the kids were pestering me for lunch as if I had starved them.... when in reality they had breakfast AND snacks. 

So, our day was not off to the best start.  But we got the kids fed- and finally satisfied- and tried to have some quiet, calm, resting time.

Not long after 2pm, Alex went into the front room to play with Melinda and Jacob.  Not 2 seconds after he got in there, he was screaming bloody murder.  When I found him, he had deep red blood dripping from his eyebrow, down his temple, and nearly into his eye.  I instantly knew this wasn't good.  Alex gets hurt a lot between his own feats of mobility and the antics and roughhousing of his older siblings.  But it's rare that he actually bleeds.

We gently cleaned his eyebrow with a cloth, and there was definitely a gash.  We found out that Jacob had pushed Alex (in play) and he had fallen against the square corner of the rocking chair seat.  Once we cleaned the wound up, though, the bleeding wasn't alarming.  It oozed very slowly.  But it was a big gash.  On his eyebrow.  Jesse and I were both thinking of what a bad scar this could leave, and not feeling sure about what we should do.

When Melinda cut her head on a dresser in Colorado a couple years ago, we were able to get some skin glue ("liquid stitches") from the grocery store just down the road, and fix her up nicely.  We decided to try that route for Alex, too.  So Jesse ran out to the pharmacy, but had no luck finding any.  Then he asked a pharmacist, who didn't seem to even know what he was looking for.  He tried a few different stores, also with no luck.  The closest he could get was liquid bandaids, which don't exactly hold skin together.  Jesse keeps grumbling about it probably being against the law to sell it in Maryland or something like that.  

While Jesse was out looking for the glue, I kept pressure on Alex's cut, and ended up shaving off his eyebrow, too, since we wouldn't want hair to heal itself into it.  Glad to have an electric razor on hand!

Still thinking of a really ugly scar, we decided to take him to urgent care.  There's an urgent care very close to us, not associated with the hospital.  They advertise little wait time, and other such niceties, so we went there.  After filling out a bit of paperwork and waiting maybe 5 minutes, they called us back.

When we got to see the doctor, he took a look and thought it might need stitches.  But after cleaning it with an alcohol wipe (it was already clotting, less than an hour later), he thought it looked too superficial to worry about, and was concerned about using the liquid stitches so close to his eye.  But he understood our concerns about a big ugly scar, and agreed that the liquid stitches could minimize the scar a bit.  He brought in a nurse to help hold some gauze over his eye while he applied the glue.  It was a messy business, but Alex was amazingly calm.  Didn't squirm or fuss or anything, just looked curiously at the people hovering over him.  The doctor couldn't stop remarking over his behavior like he was some miracle child, and it was beginning to become obvious that he had NEVER treated a child as calm as Alex.  Truth be told, I was even a little mystified, because he usually hates to be made to lay down.  You should hear him when I have to pin him down to brush his teeth!!

Anyway, I watched as the doctor applied the glue, and it seemed like he was doing a fine job, squeezing the wound together as he applied it, and after he finished, to keep it together while it dried.  But Jesse feels like it looks pretty jagged and open in some places, and is feeling pretty unhappy about it, just wishing we could have gotten a hold of some glue and done it ourselves.  Of course, I agree that we probably could have done at least as well ourselves, and saved us a trip to urgent care (and who knows how much money for a copay, I have no clue!)... but I guess that's life, when you're not sure if a wound needs stitches and you can't find any skin glue in the stores.  (Note to self: Find some online and keep it on hand!!)

We probably could have gotten away without doing anything, with how superficial it is.  But ugh, those thoughts of big ugly scars... they just wouldn't go away!  And it made us unsure about what would be best.  No big panic or big rush to urgent care... just more of a "I guess we need to do this to be on the safe side" sort of attitude.

Anyway, here's the little guy after we got home.  As you can see, he was all fine and happy already (and saying "cheese", in the likely case you can't decipher that face).  Won't be surprised if he ends up with a black eye fairly soon.  And I'm really regretting not setting up some family portraits for yesterday like I had been considering.  Because who knows what he'll look like for the next several months, right?

Ah, urgent care.  I'm not sure how we avoided it for so long, with the three kids that we have.  I suppose it was inevitable that it happen soon.  Still... it's been a very long day.